Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization
Edward Burnet Tylor · 1865 · First edition, John Murray, London, 1865 (Archive.org researchesintoea65tylo, DjVu text layer) · Public Domain · uncorrected OCR — being verified against the scan
First edition, John Murray, London, 1865, per the work's own title page.
Served verbatim, era-bound vocabulary and all — the house frames, it never
paraphrases; what a passage does and does not show rides its receipt.
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION,
In studying the phenomena of knowledge and art, religion and
mythology, law and custom, and the rest of the complex whole
which we call Civilization, it is not enough to have in view the
more advanced races, and to know their history so far as direct
records have preserved it for us. The explanation of the state
of things in which we live has often to be sought in the con-
dition of rude and early tribes; and without a knowledge of
this to guide us, we may miss the meaning even of familiar
thoughts and practices. To take a trivial instance, the state-
ment is true enough as it stands, that the women of modern
Europe mutilate their ears to hang jewels in them, but the
reason of their doing so is not to be fully found in the circum-
stances among which we are living now. The student who
takes a wider view thinks of the rings and bones and feathers
thrust through the cartilage of the nose; the weights that pull
the slit ears in long nooses to the shoulder ; the ivory studs let
in at the corners of the mouth; the wooden plugs as big as
table-spoons put through slits in the under lip; the teeth of
animals stuck point outwards through holes in the cheeks ; all
familiar things among the lower races up and down in the
world. The modern earring of the higher nations stands not
as a product of our own times, but as a relic of a ruder mental
condition, one of the many cases in which the result of progress
has been not positive in adding, but negative in taking away,
something belonging to an earlier state of things.
It is indeed hardly too much to say that Civilization, being
a process of long and complex growth, can only be thoroughly
understood when studied through its entire range; that the
past is continually needed to explain the present, and the whole
to explain the part. A feeling of this may account m some
measure for the eager curiosity which is felt for descriptions of
the life and habits of strange and ancient races, in Cook’s Voy-
ages, Catlin’s ‘ North American Indians,’ Prescott’s ‘Mexico’
and ‘ Peru,’ even in the meagre details which antiquaries have
succeeded in recovering of the lives of the Lake-dwellers of
Switzerland and the Reindeer Tribes of Central France. For
matters of practical life these people may be nothing to us;
but in reading of them we are consciously or unconsciously
completing the picture, and tracing out the course of life, of
what has been so well said to be after all our most interesting
object of study, mankind.
Though, however, the Early History of Man is felt to be
an attractive subject, and great masses of the materials needed
for working it out have long been forthcoming, they have as
yet been turned to but little account. The opinion that the
use of facts is to illustrate theories, the confusion between
History and Mythology, which is only now being partly cleared
up, an undue confidence in the statements of ancient writers,
whose means of information about times and places remote
from themselves were often much narrower than those which
are, ages later, at our own command, have been among the
hindrances to the growth of sound knowledge in this direction.
The time for writing a systematic treatise on the subject does
not seem yet to have come; certainly nothing of the kind is
attempted in the present series of essays, whose contents,
somewhat miscellaneous as they are, scarcely come into contact
with great part of the most important problems involved, such
as the relation of the bodily characters of the various races,
the question of their origin and descent, the development of
morals, religion, law, and many others. The matters dis-
cussed have been chosen, not so much for their absolute im-
portance, as because, while they are among the easiest and
most inviting parts of the subject, it is possible so to work
them as to bring into view certain general lines of argument,
which apply not only to them, but also to the more complex
and difficult problems involved in a complete treatise on the
History of Civilization. These lines of argument, and their re-
lation to the different essays, may be briefly stated at the outset.
In the first place, when a general law can be inferred from
a group of facts, the use of detailed history is very much super-
seded. When we see a magnet attract a piece of iron, having
‘ come by experience to the general law that magnets attract
iron, we do not take the trouble to go into the history of the
particular magnet in question. To some extent this direct
reference to general laws may be made in the study of Civil-
zation. The four next chapters of the present book treat of the
various ways in which man utters his thoughts, in Gestures,
Words, Pictures, and Writing. Here, though Speech and
Writing must be investigated historically, depending as they
do in so great measure on the words and characters which were
current in the world thousands of years ago, on the other hand
the Gesture-Language and Picture- Writing may be mostly ex-
plained without the aid of history, as direct products of the
human mind. In the following chapter on “Images and
Names,” an attempt is made to refer a great part of the beliefs
and practices included under the general name of magic, to one
very simple mental law, as resulting from a condition of mind
which we of the more advanced races have almost outgrown,
and in doing so have undergone one of the most notable
changes which we can trace as having happened to mankind.
And lastly, a particular habit of mind accounts for a class of
stories which are here grouped together as ‘‘ Myths of Obser-
vation,” as distinguished from the tales which make up the
great bulk of the folk-lore of the world, and which latter are
now being shown by the new school of Comparative Mytho-
logists in Germany and England to have come into existence
also by virtue of a general law, but a very different one.
B2
But it is only in particular parts of Human Culture where
the facts have not, so to speak, travelled far from their causes,
that this direct method is practicable. Most of its phenomena
have grown into shape out of such a complication of events,
that the laborious piecing together of their previous history is
the only safe way of studying them. It is easy to see how far
a theologian or a lawyer would go wrong who should throw
history aside, and attempt to explain, on abstract principles,
the existence of the Protestant Church or the Code Napoléon.
A Romanesque or an Early English cathedral is not to be
studied as though all that the architect had to do was to take
stone and mortar and set up a building for a given purpose.
The development of the architecture of Greece, its passage
into the architecture of Rome, the growth of Christian cere-
mony and symbolism, are only part of the elements which went
to form the state of things in which the genius of the builder
had to work out the requirements of the moment. The late
Mr. Buckle did good service in urging students to look through
the details of history to the great laws of Human Development
which he behind; but his attempt to explain, by a few rash
generalizations, the complex phases of European history, is a
warning of the danger of too hasty an appeal to first principles.
As, however, the earlier civilization lies very much ont of the
beaten track of history, the place of direct records has to be
supplied in great measure by indirect evidence, such as Anti-
quities, Language, and Mythology. This makes it generally
difficult to get a sound historical basis to work on, but there
happens to be a quantity of material easily obtainable, which
bears on the development of some of the more common and
useful arts. Thus in the eighth and ninth chapters, the tran-
sition from implements of stone to those of metal is demon-
strated to have taken place in almost every district of the habi-
table globe, and a progress from ruder to more perfect modes
of making fire and boiling food is traced in many different
countries ; while in the seventh, evidence is collected on the
important problem of the relation which Progress has borne to
Decline in art and knowledge in the history of the world.
In the remote times and places where direct history is at
fault, the study of Civilization, Culture-History as it is conve-
niently called in Germany, becomes itself an important aid to
the historian, as a means of re-constructing the lost records of
early or barbarous times. But its use as contributing to the
early history of mankind depends mainly on the answering of
the following question, which runs through all the present
essays, and binds them together as various ¢cases of a single
problem.
When similar arts, customs, or legends are found in several
distant regions, among peoples not known to be of the same
stock, how is this similarity to be accounted for? Sometimes
it may be ascribed to the like working of men’s minds under
like conditions, and sometimes it is a proof of blood relationship
or of intercourse, direct or indirect, between the races among
whom it is found. In the one case it has no historical value
whatever, while in the other it has this value in a high degree,
and the ever-recurring problem is how to distinguish between
the two. An example on each side may serve to bring the
matter into a clearer light.
The general prevalence of a belief in the continuance of the
soul’s existence after death, does not prove that all mankind
have inherited such a belief from a common source. It may
have been so, but the historical argument is made valueless
by the fact that certain natural phenomena may have sug-
gested to the mind of man, while in a certain stage of develop-
ment, the idea of a future state, and this not once only, but
again and again in different regions and at different times.
These phenomena may prove nothing of the kind to us, but
that is not the question. The reasoning of the savage is not
to be judged by the rules which belong to a higher education ;
and what the ethnologist requires in such a case, is not to
know what the facts prove to his own mind, but what mference
the very differently trained mind of the savage may draw from
them.
The belief that man has a soul capable of existing apart from
the body it belongs to, and continuing to live, for a time at
least, after that body is dead and buried, fits perfectly m such
a mind with the fact that the shadowy forms of men and women
do appear to others, when the men and women themselves are
at a distance, and after they are dead. We call these appari-
tions dreams or phantasms, according as the person to whom
they appear is asleep or awake, and when we hear of their
occurrence in ordinary life, set them down as subjective pro-
cesses of the mind. We do not think that the phantom of the
dark Brazilian who used to haunt Spinoza was a real person ;
that the head which stood before a late distinguished English
peer, whenever he was out of health, was a material object ; that
the fiends which torment the victim of delirium tremens, are
what and where they seem to him to be; that any real occur-
rence corresponds to the dreams of the old men who tell us
they were flogged last night at school. It is only a part of
mankind, however, who thus disconnect dreams and visions
from the objects whose forms they bear. Among the less
civilized races, the separation of subjective and objective im-
pressions, which in this, as in several other matters, makes the
most important difference between the educated man and the
savage, is much less fully carried out. This is indeed true to
some extent among the higher nations, for no Greenlander or
Kafir ever mixed up his subjectivity with the evidence of his
senses into a more hopeless confusion than the modern spiritu-
alist. As the subject is only brought forward here as an illus-
tration, it is not necessary to go at length into its details. A
few picked examples will bring into view the two great theories
of dreams and visions, current among the lower races. One is,
that when a man is asleep or seeing visions, the figures which
appear to him come from their places and stand over against
him ; the other, that the soul of the dreamer or seer goes out
on its travels, and comes home with a remembrance of what it
has seen.
The Australians, says Sir George Grey, believe that the
nightmare is caused by an evil spirit. To get rid of it they
jump up, catch a lighted brand from the fire, and with various
muttered imprecations fling it in the direction where they think
the spirit is. He simply came for a light, and having got it,
he will go away.! Others tell of the demon Koin, a creature
) Grey, ‘Journals ;’ London, 1841, vol. ii. p. 339.
who has the appearance of a native, and like them is painted
with pipe-clay and carries a fire-stick. He comes sometimes
when they are asleep and carries a man off as an eagle does its
prey. ‘The shout of the victim’s companions makes the demon
let him drop, or else he carries him off to his fire in the bush.
The unfortunate black tries to cry out, but feels himself all but
choked and cannot. At daylight Koi disappears, and the
native finds himself brought safely back to his own fireside.’
Byen in Europe, such expressions as being ridden by a hag or
by the devil, preserve the recollection of a similar train of
thought. In the evil demons who trouble people in their sleep,
the Incubi and Succubi, the bel-ef in this material and personal
character of the figures seen in dreams comes strongly out,
perhaps nowhere more strikingly than among the natives of the
Tonga Islands.?_ “ Whoso seeth me in his sleep,” said Mo-
hammed, “seeth me truly, for Satan cannot assume the simili-
tude of my form.”
Mr. St. John says that the Dayaks regard dreams as actual
occurrences. They think that in sleep the soul sometimes re-
mains in the body, and sometimes leaves it and travels far
away, and that both when in and out of the body it sees and
hears and talks, and altogether has a prescience given to it,
which, when the body is in its natural state, it does not enjoy.
Fainting fits, or a state of coma, are thought to be caused by
the departure or absence of the soul on some distant expedition
of its own. When a European dreams of his distant country,
the Dayaks think his soul has annihilated space, and paid a
flying visit to Europe during the night.’ Very many tribes be-
lieve in this way that dreams are incidents which happen to
the spirit in its wanderings from the body, and the idea has
even expressed itself in a superstitious objection to waking a
sleeper, for fear of disturbing his body while his soul is out.*
Father Charlevoix found both the theories in question current
1 Backhouse, ‘ Visit to the Australian Colonies ;’ London, 1843, p. 555.
2 Mariner, ‘Tonga Islands ;’ 2nd ed., London, 1818, vol. ii. p. 112.
3 St. John, ‘Forests of the Far East ;’ London, 1862, vol. i. p. 189.
4 Bastian, ‘Der Mensch in der Geschichte ;’ Leipzig, 1860, vol. ii. p. 318,
etc. etc. .
among the Indians of North America. A dream might either
be a visit from the soul of the object dreamt of, or it might be
one of the souls of the dreamer going about the world, while
the other—for every man has two—stayed behind with the body.
Dreams, they think, are of supernatural origin, and it is a reli-
gious duty to attend to them. That the white men should look
upon a dream as a matter of no consequence is a thing they
cannot understand.
How like a dream is to the popular notion of a soul, a shade,
a spirit, or a ghost, need not be said. But there are facts
which bring the dream and the ghost into yet closer connection
than follows from mere resemblance. Thus the belief is found
among the Finnish races that the spirits of the dead can plague
the living in their sleep, and bring sickness and harm upon
them.? Herodotus relates that the Nasamones practise divina-
tion in the following manner :—they resort to the tombs of
‘their ancestors, and after offering prayers, go to sleep by them,
and whatever dream appears to them they take for their answer.’
In modern Africa, the missionary Casalis says of the Basuto,
“Persons who are pursued in their sleep by the image of a de-
ceased relation, are often known to sacrifice a victim on the
tomb of the defunct, in order, as they say, to calm his dis-
quietude.”* Clearly, then, a man who thinks he sees in sleep
the apparitions of his dead relatives and friends has a reason
for believing that their spirits outlive their bodies, and this
reason hes in no far-fetched induction, but in what seems to
be the plain evidence of his senses. I have set the argument
down as belonging especially to the lower stages of mental de-
velopment, though imdeed I have been startled by hearing it
myself urged in sober earnest very far outside the range of
savage life.
It is interesting to read how Lucretius, reasoning against
1 Charlevoix, Hist. et Descr. Gén. de la Nouvelle-France ; Paris, 1744, vol.
vi. p. 78.
2 Castrén, ‘Vorlesungen iiber die Finnische Mythologie ;’ (Tr. and Ed.
Schiefner ;) St. Petersburg, 1853, p. 120.
3 Herod. iv. 172. See Melai. 8.
* Casalis, ‘The Basutos ;’ London, 1861, p. 245.
the belief in a future life, takes notice of the argument from
dreams as tellmg against him, and states, in opposition to it,
his doctrine that not dreams only, but even ordinary appear-
ances and imaginations, are caused by film-like images which
fly off from the surfaces of real objects, and come in contact
with our minds and senses,—
“ Touching these matters, let me now explain,
How there are so-called images of things
Which, like films torn from bodies’ outmost face
Hither and thither flutter through the air.
These scare us, meeting us in waking hours,
And in our dreams, when oftentimes we see
Marvellous shapes, and phantoms of the dead
Which oft have roused us horror-struck from sleep.
Lest we should judge perchance that souls escape
From Acheron, shades flit ‘mid living men,
Or aught of us can after death endure.”?
Never, perhaps, has the train of thought which the Epicurean
poet so ingeniously combats been more clearly drawn out than
in Madge Wildfire’s rambling talk of her dead baby, ‘“ Whiles
I think my puir bairn’s dead—ye ken very weel it’s buried—
but that signifies naething. I have had it on my knee a hun-
dred times, and a hundred till that, since it was buried—and
how could that be were it dead, ye ken—it’s merely impos-
sible.”
It appears then, from these considerations, that when we find
dim notions of a future state current in the remotest regions
of the world, we must not thence assume that they were all
1 Lucret. :—‘ De Rerum Natura,’ iv. 29-39 :—
*“* Nunc agere incipiam tibi, quod vementer ad has res
Attinet, esse ea quee rerum simulacra vocamus ;
Que, quasi membrane summo de corpore rerum
Derepte, volitant ultroque citroque per auras,
Atque eadem nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes
Terrificant atque in somnis, cum seepe figuras
Contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum,
Que nos horrifice languentis sepe sopore
Excierunt ; ne forte animas Acherunte reamur
Effugere aut umbras inter vivos volitare,
Neve aliquid nostri post mortem posse relinqui.”
diffused from a single geographical centre. The case is one in
which any one plausible explanation from natural causes is
sufficient to bar the argument from historical connection. On
the other hand, there is nothing to hinder such an argument
in the following case, which is taken as showing the opposite
side of the problem.
The great class of stories known as Beast Fables have of late
risen much in public estimation. In old times they were lis-
tened to by high and low with the keenest enjoyment for their
own sake. Then they were wrested from their proper nature
into means of teaching little moral lessons, and at last it came
to be the most contemptuous thing that could be said of a silly,
pointless tale, to call it a “cock and bull story.” In our own
day, however, a generation among whom there has sprung up
a new knowledge of old times, and with it a new sympathy
with old thoughts and feelings, not only appreciate the beast
fables for themselves, but find in their diffusion over the world
an important aid to early history. Thus Dr. Dasent, in his
Introduction to the Norse Tales, has shown that popular
stories found in the west and south of Africa must have come
from the same source with old myths current in distant regions
of Europe. Still later, Dr. Bleek has published a collection
of Hottentot Fables,’ which shows that other mythic episodes,
long familiar in remote countries, have established themselves
among these rude people as household tales.
A Dutchman found a Snake, who was lying under a great
stone, and could not get away. He lifted up the stone, and set
her free, but when he had done it she wanted to eat him. The
Man objected to this, and appealed to the Hare and the Hyena,
but both said it was right. Then they asked the Jackal, but he
would not even believe the thing could have happened unless
he saw it with his two eyes. So the Snake lay down, and the
Man put the stone upon her, just to show how it was. “ Now
let her lie there,” said the Jackal. This is only another version
of the story of the Ungrateful Crocodile, which the sage Dibin
declined to tell the king while the executioner was standing
ready to cut his head off. It is given by Mr. Lane in his Notes
1 Bleek, ‘ Reynard the Fox in South Africa;’ London, 1864, pp. 11-13, 16, 19, 23.
to the Arabian Nights,! and I am not sure that the simpler
Hottentot version is not the neater of the two. Again, the
name of Reynard in South Africa, given by Dr. Bleek to his
Hottentot tales, is amply justified by their containing familiar
episodes belonging to the medieval ‘‘ Reynard the Fox.’”? The
Jackal shams death and lies in the road till the fish-waggon
comes by, and the waggoner throws him in to make a kaross
of his skin, but the cunning beast throws a lot of fish out into
the road, and then jumps out himself. In another place, the
Lion is sick, and all the beasts go to see him but the Jackal.
His enemy the Hyena fetches him to give his advice, so he
comes before the Lion, and says he has been to ask the witch
what was to be done for his sick uncle, and the remedy is for
the Lion to pull the Hyena’s skin off over his ears, and put it
on himself while it is warm. Again, the trick by which Chan-
ticleer gets his head out of Reynard’s mouth by making him
answer the farmer, reminds one of the way in which, in the
Hottentot tale, the Cock makes the Jackal say his prayers, and
when the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts his eyes,
flies off and makes his escape. Of course these tales, though
adapted to native circumstances and with very clever native
turns, may be all of very recent introduction. Such a story as
that which introduces a fish-waggon, would be naturally referred
to the Dutch boers, from whom indeed all the Reynard stories
are likely to have come. One curious passage tends to show
that the stories are taken, not from the ancient versions of
Reynard, but from some interpolated modern rendering. A
proof that Jacob Grimm brings forward of the independent,
secluded course of the old German Beast-Saga, is, that it did
not take up into itself stories long current elsewhere, which would
have fitted admirably into it,—thus, for instance, Alsop’s story
of the Fox who will not go into the Lion’s den because he only
sees the footsteps going in, but none coming out, is nowhere to
be found in the medieval Reynard. But we find in the Hot-
tentot tales that this very episode has found its way in, and
1 Lane, ‘The Thousand and One Nights,’ new edit., London, 1859, vol. i.
pp. 84, 114.
_2 Jacob Grimm, ‘ Reinhart Fuchs ;’ Berlin, 1834, pp. cxxii. 1. 30, eclxxil.
exactly into its fitting place. ‘The Lion, it is said, was ill, and
they all went to see him in his suffermg. But the Jackal did
not go, because the traces of the people who went to see him
did not turn back.”
As it happens, we know from other sources enough to ex-
plain the appearance in South Africa of stories from Reynard
and the Arabian Nights by referring them to European or
Moslem influence. But even without such knowledge, the
tales themselves prove an historical connection, near or remote,
between Europe, Egypt, and South Africa. To try to make
such evidence stand alone is a more ambitious task. In a
chapter on the Geographical Distribution of Myths, I have
compared a series of stories collected on the American Conti-
nent with their analogues elsewhere, endeavouring thereby to
show an historical connection between the mythology of Ame-
rica and that of the rest of the world, but with what success
the reader must decide. In another chapter, some remarkable
customs, which are found spread over distant tracts of country,
are examined in order to ascertain, if possible, whether any
historical argument may be grounded upon them.
For the errors which no doubt abound in the present essays,
and for the superficial working of a great subject, a word may
be said in apology. In discussing questions in which some-
times the leading facts have never before been even roughly
grouped, it is very difficult not only to reject the wrong evi-
dence, but to reproduce the right with accuracy, and the way
in which new information comes:in, which quite alters the face
of the old, does not tend to promote over-confidence in first re-
sults. For instance, after having followed other observers in
setting down as peculiar to the South Sea Islands, in or near
the Samoan group, an ingenious little drilling instrument
which will be hereafter described, I found it kept in stock in
the London tool shops; mistakes of this kind must be frequent
till our knowledge of the lower civilization is much more tho-
roughly collected and sifted. More accuracy might indeed be
obtained by keeping to a very small number of subjects, but
our accounts of the culture of the lower races, being mostly
unclassified, have to be gone through as a whole, and up to a
certain point it is a question whether the student of a very
limited field might not lose more in largeness of view than he
gained by concentration. Whatever be the fate of my argu-
ments, any one who collects and groups a mass of evidence,
and makes an attempt to turn it to account which may lead to
something better, has, I think, a claim to be exempt from any
very harsh criticism of mistakes and omissions. As the Knight
says in the beginning of his Tale :—
“T have, God wot, a largé feeld to ere;
And wayké ben the oxen in my plough.”
[Beside ordinary references, I wish to acknowledge separately some
particular obligations. My friend Mr, Henry Christy has given me, for
years past, not only the benefit of his wide knowledge of ethnography,
but also the opportunity of studying the productions of the lower races
from the carefully chosen specimens in his great collection. I am in-
debted to Dr. W. R. Scott, the Director of the Deaf and Dumb Institu-
tion, at Exeter, for much of the assistance which has enabled me to write
about the Gesture-Language with something of the confidence of an
‘“‘expert;” and I have to thank Prof. Pott, of Halle, and Prof. Lazarus,
of Berne, for personal help in several difficult questions. Among books,
I have drawn largely from the philological works of Prof. Steinthal, of
Berlin, and from the invaluable collection of facts bearing on the history
of civilization in the ‘ Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit,’ and
‘ Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft,’ of Dr. Gustav Klemm, of Dresden. ]
Chapter 2
THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE.
Tur power which man possesses of uttering his thoughts is
one of the most essential elements of his civilization. Whether
he can even think at all without some means of outward expres-
sion is a metaphysical question which need not be discussed
here. Thus much will hardly be denied by any one, that man’s
power of utterance, so far exceeding any that the lower animals
possess, is one of the principal causes of his immense pre-emi-
nence over them.
Of the means which man has of uttering or expressing that
which is in his mind, speech is by far the most important, so
much so that when we speak of uttering our thoughts, the
phrase is understood to mean expressing them in words. But
when we say that man’s power of utterance is one of the great
differences between him and the lower animals, we must attach
to the word utterance a sense more fully conformable to its
etymology. As Steinthal admits, the deaf-and-dumb man is
the living refutation of the proposition, that man cannot think
without speech, unless we allow the understood notion of speech
as the utterance of thought by articulate sounds to be too nar-
row.! To utter a thought is literally to put it outside us, as to
express it is to squeeze it out. Grossly material as these meta-
phors are, they are the best terms we have for that wonderful
1 Steinthal, ‘Ueber die Sprache der Taubstummen’ (in Prutz’s ‘ Deutsches Mu-
seum,’ Jan. to June, 1851, p. 904, etc.),
process by which a man, by some bodily action, can not only
make other men’s minds reproduce more or less exactly the
workings of his own, but can even receive back from the out-
ward sign an impression similar to theirs, as though not he
himself, but some one else, had made it.
Besides articulate speech, the principal means by which man
can express what is in his mind are the Gesture-Language,
Picture- Writing, and Word-Writing. If we knew now, what
we hope to know some day, how Language sprang up and grew
in the world, our knowledge of man’s earliest condition and
history would stand on a very different basis from what it now
does. But we know so little about the Origin of Language,
that even the greatest philologists are forced either to avoid
the subject altogether, or to turn themselves into metaphysi-
cians in order to discuss it. The Gesture-Language and Pic-
ture-Writing, however, insignificant as they are in practice in
comparison with Speech and Phonetic Writing, have this great
claim to consideration, that we can really understand them as
thoroughly as perhaps we can understand anything, and by
studying them we can realize to ourselves in some measure a
condition of the human mind which underlies anything which
has as yet been traced in even the lowest dialect of Language,
if taken as a whole. Though, with the exception of words
which are evidently imitative, like ‘“ peewit”? and “ cuckoo,”
we cannot at present tell by what steps man came to express
himself by words, we can at least see how he still does come to
express himself by signs and pictures, and so get some idea of
the nature of this great movement, which no lower animal is
known to have made or shown the least sign of making. There
is, however, no proof that man passed through any intermediate
stage, such as the use of gestures, before he spoke. This
theory, though by no means contemptible, has, so far as at pre-
sent appears, no sufficient support from observed facts.
The Gesture-Language, or Language of Signs, is in great
part a system of representing objects and ideas by a rude out-
line-gesture, imitating their most striking features. It is, as
has been well said by a deaf-and-dumb man, “a picture-lan-
guage.” Here at once its essential difference from speech be-
comes evident. Why the words stand and go mean what they
do is a question to which we cannot as yet give the shadow of
an answer, and if we had been taught to say “ stand” where
we now say “go,” and “go” where we now say “stand,” it
would be practically all the same to us. No doubt there was a
sufficient reason for these words receiving the meanings they
now bear, as indeed there is a sufficient reason for everything ;
but so far as we are concerned, there might as well have been
none, for we have quite lost sight of the connection between
the word and the idea. But in the gesture-language the rela-
tion between idea and sign not only always exists, but is scarcely
lost sight of fora moment. When a deaf-and-dumb child holds
his two first fingers forked like a pair of legs, and makes them
stand and walk upon the table, we want no teaching to show
us what this means, nor why it is done.
This definition of the gesture-language is, however, not
complete. Such objects as are actually in the presence of the
speaker, or may be supposed so, are brought bodily into the
conversation by touching, pointing, or looking towards them,
either to indicate the objects themselves or one of their charac-
teristics. Thus if a deaf and dumb man touches his underlip
with his forefinger, the context must decide whether he means
to indicate the lip itself or the colour “ red,”’ unless, as is some-
times done, he shows by actually taking hold of the lip with
finger and thumb, that it is the lip itself, and not its quality,
that he means. Under the two classes ‘‘ pictures in the air”
and things brought before the mind by actual pointing out, the
whole of the sign-language may be included,
It is in Deaf and Dumb Institutions that the gesture-lan-
guage may be most conveniently studied, and what slight prac-
tical knowledge I have of it has been got in this way in Ger-
many and in England, In these institutions, however, there
are grammatical signs used in the gesture-language which do
not fairly belong to it. These are mostly signs adapted, or
perhaps invented, by teachers who had the use of speech, to ex-
press ideas which do not come within the scope of the very
limited natural grammar and dictionary of the deaf-and-dumb.
But it is to be observed that though the deaf-and-dumb have
been taught to understand these signs and use them in school,
they ignore them in their ordinary talk, and will have nothing
to do with them if they can help it.
By dint of instruction, deaf-mutes can be taught to commu-
nicate their thoughts, and to learn from books and men in
nearly the same way as we do, though in a more limited de-
gree. They learn to read and write, to spell out sentences
with the finger-alphabet, and to understand words so spelt by
others ; and besides this, they can be taught to speak in articu-
late language, though in a hoarse and unmodulated voice, and
when another speaks, to follow the motions of his lps almost
as though they could hear the words uttered.
It may be remarked here, once for all, that the general public
often confuses the real deaf-and-dumb language of signs, in
which objects and actions are expressed by pantomimic ges-
tures, with the deaf-and-dumb finger-alphabet, which is a mere
substitute for alphabetic writing. It is not enough to say that
the two things are distinct ; they have nothing whatever to do
with one another, and have no more resemblance than a picture
has to a written description of it. Though of little scientific
interest, the finger-alphabet is of great practical use. It appears
to have been invented in Spain, to which country the world
owes the first systematic deaf-and-dumb teaching, by Juan
Pablo Bonet, in whose work a one-handed alphabet is set forth
differing but little from that now in-use in Germany, or perhaps
by his predecessor, Pedro de Ponce. The two-handed or
French alphabet, generally used in England, is of newer date.!
The mother-tongue (so to speak) of the deaf-and-dumb is
the language of signs. The evidence of the best observers
tends to prove that they are capable of developing the gesture.
language out of their own minds without the aid of speaking
men. Indeed the deaf-mutes in general surpass the rest of the
world in their power of using and understanding signs, and for
this simple reason, that though the gesture-language is the
common property of all mankind, it is seldom cultivated and
1 Bonet, ‘Reduction de las Letras, y Arte para ensefiar 4 ablar los Mudos;’
Madrid, 1620; pp. 128, etc. Schmalz, ‘ Ueber die Taubstummen ;’ Dresden and
Leipzig, 1848; pp. 214, 352.
developed to so high a degree by those who have the use of
speech, as by those who cannot speak, and must therefore have
recourse to other means of communication. The opinions of
two or three practical observers may be cited to show that the
gesture-language is not, like the finger-alphabet, an art learnt
in the first instance from the teacher, but an independent pro-
cess originating in the mind of the deaf-mute, and developing
itself as his knowledge and power of reasoning expand under
instruction.
Samuel Heinicke, the founder of deaf-and-dumb teaching in
Germany, remarks :—“ He (the deaf-mute) prefers keeping to
his pantomime, which is simple and short, and comes to him
fluently as a mother-tongue.”! Schmalz says :—‘ Not less com-
prehensible are many signs which we indeed do not use in ordi-
nary life, but which the deaf-and-dumb child uses, having no
means of communicating with others but by signs. These
signs consist principally in drawing in the air the shape of
objects to be suggested to the mind, indicating their character,
imitating the movement of the body in an action to be de-
scribed, or the use of a thing, its origin, or any other of its
notable peculiarities.”? ‘With regard to signs,” says Dr.
Scott, of Exeter, “the (deaf-and-dumb) child will most likely
have already fixed upon signs by which it names most of the
objects given in the above lesson (pin, key, etc.), and which it
uses in its intercourse with its friends. These signs had always
better be retained (by the child’s family), and if a word has not
received such a sign, endeavour to get the child to fix upon
one. It will do this most probably better than you.’
The Abbé Sicard, one of the first and most eminent of the
men who have devoted their lives to the education and “ hu-
manizing ” of these afflicted creatures, has much the same ac-
count to give. “It is not I,” he says, “who am to invent
these signs. I have only to set forth the theory of them under
the dictation of their true inventors, those whose language
consists of these signs. It is for the deaf-and-dumb to make
them, and for me to tell how they are made. They must be
’ Heinicke, ‘Beobachtungen tiber Stumme,’ etc. ; Hamburg, 1778, p. 56.
2 Schmalz, p. 267. 3 Scott, ‘The Deaf and Dumb ;’ London, 1844, p. 84.
drawn from the nature of the objects they are to represent. It
is only the signs given by the mute himself to express’ the
actions which he witnesses, and the objects which are brought
before him, which can replace articulate language.” Speaking
of his celebrated deaf-and-dumb pupil, Massieu, he says :—
“Thus, by a happy exchange, as I taught him the written
signs of our language, Massieu taught me the mimic signs of
his.” “So it must be said that it is neither I nor my admi-
rable master (the Abbé de ’Epée) who are the inventors of the
deaf-and-dumb language. And as a foreigner is not fit to
teach a Frenchman French, so the speaking man has no busi-
ness to meddle with the invention of signs, giving them abstract
values.”! All these are modern statements; but long before
the days of Deaf and Dumb Institutions, Rabelais’ sharp eye
had noticed how natural and appropriate were the untaught
signs made by born deaf-mutes. When Panurge is going to try
by divination from signs what his fortune will be in married
life, Pantagruel thus counsels him :—* Pourtant, vous fault
choisir ung mut sourd de nature, aflin que ses gestes vous
soyent naifuement propheticques, non fainctz, fardez, ne
affectez.”
Nor are we obliged to depend upon the observations of ordi-
nary speaking men for our knowledge of the way in which the
gesture-language developes itself in the mind of the deaf-and-
dumb. The educated deaf-mutes can tell us from their own
experience how gesture-signs originate. The following account
is given by Kruse, a deaf-mute himself, and a well-known
teacher of deaf-mutes, and author of several works of no small
ability :—“ Thus the deaf-and-dumb must have a language,
without which no thought can be brought to pass. But here
nature soon comes to his help. What strikes him most, or
what ... makes a distinction to him between one thing and
another, such distinctive signs of objects are at once signs by
which he knows these objects, and knows them again; they
become tokens of things. And whilst he silently elaborates
the signs he has found for single objects, that is, whilst he de-
scribes their forms for himself in the air, or imitates them in
1 Sicard, ‘Cours d’Instruction d’un Sourd-muet;’ Paris, 18038, pp. xlv, 18.
c2
thought with hands, fingers, and gestures, he developes for
himself suitable signs to represent ideas, which serve him as a
means of fixing ideas of different kinds in his mind and re-
calling them to his memory. And thus he makes himself a
language, the so-called gesture-language (Geberden-sprache) ;
and with these few scanty and imperfect signs, a way for
thought is already broken, and with his thought as it now
opens ont, the language cultivates and forms itself further and
further.’’}
I will now give some account of the particular dialect (so to
speak) of the gesture-language, which is current in the Berlin
Deaf and Dumb Institution. I made a list of about 500 signs,
taking them down from my teacher, Carl Wilke, who is himself
deaf-and-dumb, They talk of 5000 signs being in common use
there, but my list contains the most important. First, as to
the signs themselves, the following, taken at random, will give
an idea of the general principle on which all are formed.
To express the pronouns “I, thou, he,’ I push my fore-
finger against the pit of my stomach for “1I;” push it towards
the person addressed for ‘thou ;” point with my thumb over
my right shoulder for “he ;” and so on.
When I hold my right hand flat with the palm down, at the
level of my waist, and raise it towards the level of my shoulder,
that signifies “ great ;” but if I depress it instead, it means
“little,”
The sign for man”’ is the motion of taking off the hat; for
“woman,” the closed hand is laid upon the breast ; for ‘ child,”
the right elbow is dandled upon the left hand.
The adverb “hither” and the verb “to come” have the
same sign, beckoning with the finger toward oneself.
To hold the first two fingers apart, like a letter V, and dart
the finger tips out from the eyes, is to “see.’ To touch the
1 Kruse, ‘ Ueber Taubstummen,’ ete. ; Schleswig, 1853, p. 51.
* Whether the “ dialects” of the different deaf-and-dumb institutions have re-
ceived any considerable proportion of natural signs from one another, as, for in-
stance, by the spreading of the system of teaching from Paris, I am unable to
say ; but there is so much in each that differs from the others in detail, though
not in principle, that they may, I think, be held as practically independent, ex-
cept as regards grammatical signs.
ear and tongue with the fore-finger, is to “hear” and to
“taste.” Whatever is to be pointed out, the fore-finger, so
appropriately called “index,” has to point out or indicate.
... atque ipsa videtur
Protrahere ad gestum pueros infantia lingue
Quom facit ut digito que sint presentia monstrent.”!
To “speak” is to move the lips as in speaking (all the deaf-
and-dumb are taught to speak in articulate words in the Berlin
establishment), and to move the lips thus, while pointing with
the fore-finger out from the mouth, is “name,” or “to name,”
as though one should define it to “ point out by speaking.”
The outline of the shape of roof and walls done in the air
with two hands is “ house;” with a flat roof it is “room.” To
smell as at a flower, and then with the two hands make a hori-
zontal circle before one, is “ garden.”
To pull up a pinch of flesh from the back of one’s hand is
“flesh” or “meat.” Make the steam curling up from it with
the fore-finger, and it becomes “roast meat.” Make a bird’s
bill with two fingers in front of one’s lips and flap with the
arms, and that means “ goose;”’ put the first sign and these
together, and we have “‘ roast goose.”
How natural all these imitative signs are. They want no
elaborate explanation. To seize the most striking outline of
an object, the principal movement of an action, is the whole
secret, and this is what the rudest savage can do untaught,
nay, what is more, can do better and more easily than the edu-
cated man. ‘‘ None of my teachers here who can speak,” said
the Director of the Institution, ‘are very strong in the gesture-
language. It is difficult for an educated speaking man to get
the proficiency in it which a deaf-and-dumb child attams to
almost without an effort. It is true that I can use it perfectly ;
but I have been here forty years, and I made it my business
from the first to become thoroughly master of it. To be able
to speak is an impediment, not an assistance, in acquiring the
gesture-language. The habit of thinking in words, and trans-
lating these words into signs, is most difficult to shake off; but
until this is done, it is hardly possible to place the signs in the
1 Lucretius, v. 1029,
logical sequence in which they arrange themselves in the mind
of the deaf-mute.”
As new things come under the notice of the deaf-and-dumb,
of course new signs immediately come up for them. So to
express ‘railway’? and “locomotive,” the left hand makes a
chimney, and the steam curling almost horizontally out is imi-
tated with the right fore-finger. ‘The tips of the fingers of the
half-closed hand coming towards one like rays of light, is “ pho-
tograph.”
But the casual observer, who should take down every sign
he saw used in class by masters and pupils, as belonging to the
natural gesture-language, would often get a very wrong idea of
its nature. Teachers of the deaf-and-dumb have thought it
advisable for practical purposes, not merely to use the inde-
pendent development of the language of signs, but to add to
it and patch it so as to make it more strictly equivalent to their
own speech and writing. For this purpose signs have to be
introduced, for many words of which the pupil mostly learns the
meaning through their use in writing, and is taught to use the
sign where he would use the word. Thus, the clenched fists,
pushed forward with the thumbs up, mean “yet.” To throw
the fingers gently open from the temple means “when.” To
move the closed hands with the thumbs out, up and down upon
one’s waistcoat, is to “be.” All these signs may, it is true, be
based upon natural gestures. Dr. Scott, for instance, explains
“when” as formed in this way. But this kind of
derivation does not give them a claim to be included in the
pure gesture-language ; and it really does not seem as though
it would make much difference to the children if the sign for
‘“when”’ were used for ‘‘ yet,” and so on.
The Abbé Sicard has left us a voluminous account of the
sign-language he used, which may serve as an example of the
curious hybrid systems which grow up in this way, by the
grafting of the English, or French, or German grammar and
dictionary on the gesture-language. Sicard was strongly im-
pressed with the necessity of using the natural signs, and even
his most arbitrary ones may have been based on such; but he
had set himself to make gestures do whatever words can do,
the sign
and was thereby often driven to strange shifts. Yet he either
drew so directly from his deaf-and-dumb scholars, or succeeded
so well in learning to think in their way, that it is often very
hard to say exactly where the influence of spoken or written
language comes in. For instance, the deaf-mute borrows the
signs of space, as we do similar words, to express notions of
time ; and Sicard, keeping to these real signs, and only using
them with a degree of analysis which has hardly been attained
to but by means of words, makes the present tense of his verb
by indicating “here” with the two hands held out, palm down-
ward, the past tense by the hand thrown back over the shoulder,
“behind,” the future by putting the hand out, “ forward.”
But when he takes on his conjugation to such tenses as “I
should have carried,” he is merely translating words into more
or less appropriate signs. Again, by the aid of two fore-fingers
hooked together,—to express, I suppose, the notion of depen-
dence or connection,—he distinguishes between moi and me,
and by translating two abstract grammatical terms from words
into signs, he introduces another conception quite foreign to
the pure gesture-language. If something that has been signed
is a substantive, he puts the right hand under the left, to show
that it is that which stands underneath ; while if it is an adjec-
tive, he puts the right hand on the top, to show that it is the
quality which lies upon or is added to the substantive below.!
These partly artificial systems are probably very useful in
teaching, but they are not the real gesture-language, and what
is more, the foreign element so laboriously introduced seems to
have little power of holding its ground there. So far as I can
learn, few or none of the factitious grammatical signs will bear
even the short journey from the schoolroom to the playground,
where there is no longer any verb “to be,” where the abstract
conjunctions are unknown, and where mere position, quality,
action, may serve to describe substantive and adjective alike.
At Berlin, as in all deaf-and-dumb institutions, there are
numbers of signs which, though most natural in their character,
would not be understood beyond the limits of the circle in
1 Sicard, ‘Théorie des Signes pour I’ Instruction des Sourds-muets;’ Paris, 1808,
vol. ii. p. 562, etc. A really possible distinction appears in “lip,” “red,” ande, p. 16.
which they are used. These are signs which indicate an object
by some accidental peculiarity, and are rather epithets than
names. My deaf-and-dumb teacher, for instance, was named
among the children by the action of cutting off the left arm
with the edge of the right hand; the reason of this sign was,
not that there was anything peculiar about his arms, but that
he came from Spandau, and it so happened that one of the
children had been at Spandau, and had seen there a man with
one arm; thence this epithet of ‘ one-armed” came to be ap-
plied to all Spandauers, and to this one in particular. Again,
the Royal residence of Charlottenburg was named by taking up
one’s left knee and nursing it, in allusion apparently to the
late king having been laid up with the gout there.
In like manner, the children preferred to indicate foreign
countries by some characteristic epithet, to spelling out their
names on their fingers. Thus England and Englishmen were
aptly alluded to by the action of rowing a boat, while the signs
of chopping off a head and strangling were used to describe
France and Russia, in allusion to the deaths of Louis XVI.
and the Emperor Paul, events which seem to have struck the
deaf-and-dumb children as the most remarkable in the history
of the two countries. These signs are of much higher interest
than the grammatical symbols, which can only be kept in use,
so to speak, by main force, but these, too, never penetrate into
the general body of the language, and are not even permanent
in the place where they arise. They die out from one set of
children to another, and new ones come up in their stead.
The gesture-language has no grammar, properly so called ;
it knows no inflections of any kind, any more than the Chinese.
The same sign stands for “walk,” “walkest,’ “walking,”
“walked,” “walker.” Adjectives and verbs are not easily
distinguished by the deaf-and-dumb ; “ horse-black-handsome-
trot-canter,” would be the rough translation of the signs by
which a deaf-mute would state that a black handsome horse
trots and canters. Indeed, our elaborate systems of “ parts of
speech” are but little applicable to the gesture-language,
though, as will be more fully said in another chapter, it may
perhaps be possible to trace in spoken language a Dualism, in
some measure resembling that of the gesture-language, with
its two constituent parts, the bringing forward objects and
actions in actual fact, and the mere suggestion of them by imi-
tation.
It has however a syntax, which is worthy of careful ex-
amination. The syntax of speaking man differs according to
the language he may learn, “ equus niger,” ‘a black horse ;”
“hominem amo,” “j’aime ’homme.” But the deaf-mute
strings together the signs of the various ideas he wishes to
connect, in what appears to be the natural order in which they
follow one another in his mind, for it is the same among the
mutes of different countries, and is wholly independent of the
syntax which may happen to belong to the language of their
speaking friends. For instance, their usual construction is not
“black horse,” but “horse black ;”’ not “ bring a black hat,”
but “hat black bring ;” not “I am hungry, give me bread,”
but “hungry me bread give.” The essential independence of
the gesture-language may indeed be brought very clearly into
view, by noticing that ordinary educated men, when they first
begin to learn the language of signs, do not come naturally to
the use of its proper syntax, but, by arranging their gestures in
the order of the words they think in, make sentences which
are unmeaning or misleading to a deaf-mute, unless he can
reverse the process, by translating the gestures into words, and
considering what such a written sentence would mean. Going
once into a deaf-and-dumb school, and setting a boy to write
words on the black board, I drew in the air the outline of a
tent, and touched the inner part of my under-lip to indicate
“red,” and the boy wrote accordingly “a red tent.” The
teacher remarked that I did not seem to be quite a beginner
in the sign-language, or I should have translated my English
thought verbatim, and put the “red” first.
The fundamental principle which regulates the order of the
deaf-mute’s signs seems to be that enunciated by Schmalz,
“that which seems to him the most important he always sets
before the rest, and that which seems to him superfluous he
leaves out. For instance, to say, ‘My father gave me an
apple,’ he makes the sign for ‘apple,’ then that for ‘ father,’
and that for ‘1, without adding that for ‘give.’”! The fol-
lowing remarks, sent to me by Dr. Scott, seem to agree with
this view. “ With regard to the two sentences you give (I
struck Tom with a stick, Tom struck me with a stick), the
sequence in the introduction of the particular parts would, in
some measure, depend on the part that most attention was
wished to be drawn towards. Ifa mere telling of the fact was
required, my opinion is that it would be arranged so, ‘ I-Tom-
struck-a-stick,’ and the passive form in a similar manner, with
the change of Tom first. But these sentences are not gene-
rally said by the deaf-and-dumb without their having been
interested in the fact, and then, in coming to tell of them, they
first give that part they are most anxious to impress upon their
hearer. Thus if a boy had struck another boy, and the injured
party came to tell us; if he was desirous to impress us with
the idea that a particular boy did it, he would point to the boy
first. But if he was anxious to draw attention to his own
suffering, rather than to the person by whom it was caused, he
would point to himself and make the sign of striking, and then
point to the boy; or if he was wishful to draw attention to the
cause of his suffering, he might sign the striking first, and
then tell afterwards by whom it was done.”
Dr. Scott is, so far as I know, the only person who has
attempted to lay down a set of distinct rules for the syntax of
the gesture-language.” ‘The subject comes before the attri-
bute, ... the object before the action.” A third construction is
common, though not necessary, ‘the modifier after the modi-
fied.” The first construction, by which the horse is put before
the “black,” enables the deaf-mute to make his syntax supply,
to some extent, the distinction between adjective and sub-
stantive, which his imitative signs do not themselves express.
The other two are well exemplified by a remark of the Abbé
Sicard’s. ‘A pupil, to whom I one day put this question,
‘Who made God?’ and who replied, ‘God made nothing,’
left me in no doubt as to this kind of inversion, usual to the
deaf-and-dumb, when I went on to ask him, ‘Who made the
shoe?’ and he answered, ‘ The shoe made the shoemaker,’ ””
' Schmalz, p. 274. ? Scott, ‘The Deaf and Dumb,’ p. 53.
3 Sicard, ‘ Théoric,’ p. xxviii.
THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. aT
So when Laura Bridgman, who was blind as well as deaf-and-
dumb, had learnt to communicate ideas by spelling words on
her fingers, she would say ‘‘ Shut door,” ‘Give book ;” no
doubt because she had learnt these sentences whole, but when
she made sentences for herself, she would go back to the
natural deaf-and-dumb syntax, and spell out ‘‘ Laura bread
give,” to ask for bread to be given her, and “water drink
Laura,” to express that she wanted to drink water.
It is to be observed that there is one important part of con-
struction which Dr. Scott’s rules do not touch, namely, the re-
lative position of the actor and the action, the nominative case
and the verb. Dr. Schmalz attempts to lay down a partial rule
for this. “If the deaf-mute connects the sign for an action
with that for a person, to say that the person did this or that,
he places, as a general rule, the sign of the action before that
of the person. For example, to say, “I knitted,” he moves
his hands as in knitting, and then points with his fore-finger to
his breast.2. Thus, too, Heinicke remarks that to say, “The
carpenter struck me on the arm,” he would strike himself on
the arm, and then make the sign of planing,’ as if to say, “I
was struck on the arm, the planing-man did it.” But though
these constructions are, no doubt, right enough as they stand,
the rule of precedence according to importance often reverses
them. If the deaf-mute wished to throw the emphasis not upon
the knitting, but upon himself, he would probably point to him-
self first. Kruse gives the construction of “The ship sails on
the water” like our own, “ ship sail water ;” and of “I must go
to bed,” as ‘I bed go.’’#
A look of inquiry converts an assertion into a question, and
fully serves to make the difference between “The master is
come,” and “Is the master come?” The interrogative pro-
nouns, “who?” ‘ what?” are made by looking or pointing
about in an inquiring manner ; in fact, by a number of unsuc-
cessful attempts to say, “he,” ‘that.’ The deaf-and-dumb
child’s way of asking, “Who has beaten you?” would be,
“You beaten; who was it?” Though it is possible to render
1 Steinthal, Spr. der T., p. 923.
2 Schmalz, pp. 274, 58. 3 Heinicke, p. 56. + Kruse, p. 57.
a great mass of simple statements or questions, almost gesture
for word, the concretism of thought which belongs to the deaf-
mute whose mind has not been much developed by the use of
written language, and even to the educated one when he is
thinking and uttering his thoughts in his native signs, com-
monly requires more complex phrases to be re-cast. A ques-
tion so common amongst us as, ‘‘ What is the matter with
you?” would be put, “ You crying? you been beaten?” and so
on. The deaf-and-dumb child does not ask, “ What did you
have for dinner yesterday ?”’ but “ Did you have soup? did you
have porridge?” and so forth. A conjunctive sentence he ex-
presses by an alternative or contrast; “I should be punished
if I were lazy and naughty,” would be put, “TI lazy, naughty,
no!—lazy, naughty; I punished, yes!” Obligation may be
expressed in a similar way; “I must love and honour my
teacher,’ may be put, “ teacher, I beat, deceive, scold, no !—I
love, honour, yes!”’ As Stemthal says in his admirable essay,
it is only the certainty which speech gives to a man’s mind in
holding fast ideas in all their relations, which brings him to the
shorter course of expressing only the positive side of the idea,
and dropping the negative.!
What is expressed by the genitive case, or a corresponding
preposition, may have a distinct sign of holding im the gesture-
language. The three signs to express “ the gardener’s knife,”
might be the knife, the garden, and the action of grasping the
knife, pressing it to his breast, putting it into his pocket, or
something of the kind. But the mere putting together of the
possessor and the possessed may answer the purpose, as is well
shown by the way in which a deaf-and-dumb man designates
his wife’s daughter’s husband and children in making his will
by signs. The following account is taken from the ‘ Justice of
the Peace,’ October 1, 1864 :—
John Geale, of Yateley, yeoman, deaf, dumb, and unable
to read or write, died leaving a will which he had executed by
putting his mark to it. Probate of this will was refused by
Sir J. P. Wilde, Judge of the Court of Probate, on the ground
that there was no sufficient evidence of the testator’s under-
1 Kruse, p. 56, etc. Steinthal, Spr. der T., p. 928.
standing and assenting to its provisions. At a later date,
Dr. Spinks renewed the motion upon the following joint affi-
davit of the widow and the attesting witnesses :— The signs
by which deceased informed us that the will was the instrument
which was to deal with his property upon his death, and that
his wife was to have all his property after his death in case she
survived him, were in substance, so far as we are able to de-
scribe the same in writing, as follows, viz.:—The said John
Geale first pointed to the said will itself, then he pointed to
himself, and then he Jaid the side of his head upon the palm of
his right hand with his eyes closed, and then lowered his right
hand towards the ground, the palm of the same hand being up-
wards. These latter signs were the usual signs by which he
referred to his own death or the decease of some one else. He
then touched his trousers pocket (which was the usual sign by
which he referred to his money), then he looked all round
and simultaneously raised his arms with a sweeping motion all
round (which were the usual signs by which he referred to all
his property or all things). He then pointed to his wife, and
afterwards touched the ring-finger of his left hand, and then
placed his right hand across his left arm at the elbow, which
latter signs were the usual signs by which he referred to hig
wife. The signs by which the said testator informed us that
his property was to go to his wife’s daughter, in case his wife
died in his lifetime, were .. , as follows :—He first referred to his
property as before, he then touched himself, and pointed to
the ring-finger of his left hand, and crossed his arm as before
(which indicated his wife); he then laid the side of his head on
the palm of his right hand (with his eyes closed), which indiz
cated his wife’s death; he then again, after pointing to his
wife’s daughter, who was present when the said will was exe-
cuted, pointed to the ring-finger of his left hand, and then
placed his right hand across his left arm at the elbow as before,
He then pnt his forefinger to his mouth, and immediately touched
his breast, and moved his arms in such a manner as to indicate
a child, which were his usual signs for indicating his wife’s
daughter. He always indicated a female by crossing his arm,
and a male person by crossing his wrist. The signs by which
the said testator informed us that his property was to go to
William Wigg (his wife’s daughter’s husband), in case his
wife’s daughter died in his lifetime, were... as follows :—He
repeated the signs indicating his property and his wife’s
daughter, then laid the side of his head on the palm of his
right hand with his eyes closed, and lowered his hand towards
the ground as before (which meant her death); he then again
repeated the signs indicating his wife’s daughter, and crossed
his left arm at the wrist with his right hand, which meant her
husband, the said William Wigg. He also communicated to
us by signs, that the said William Wige resided in London.
The said William Wige is in the employ of and superintends
the goods department of the North-Western Railway Company
at Camden Town. The signs by which the said testator in-
formed us that his property was to go to the children of his
wife’s daughter and son-in-law, in case they both died in his
lifetime, were...as follows, namely :—He repeated the signs
indicating the said William Wigg and his wife, and their death
before him, and then placed his right hand open a short dis-
tance from the ground, and raised it by degrees, and as if by
steps, which were his usual signs for pointing out their children,
and then swept his hand round with a sweeping motion, which
indicated that they were all to be bronght in. The said tes-
tator always took great notice of the said children, and was
very fond of them. After the testator had in manner aforesaid
expressed to us what he intended to do by his said will, the said
R. T. Dunning, by means of the before-mentioned signs, and
by other motions and signs by which we were accustomed to
converse with him, informed the said testator what were the
contents and effect of the said will.
“ Sir J. P. Wilde granted the motion.”
The deaf-mute commonly expresses past and future time in a
concrete form, or by implication. To say “I have been ill,”
he may convey the idea of his being ill by looking as though
he were so, pressing in his cheeks with thumb and finger to
give himself a lantern-jawed look, putting his hand to his head,
etc., and he may show that this event was “a day behind,” “a
week behind,” that is to say yesterday or a week ago, and so
THE GESTURE-LANGUAGE. Bi
he may say that he is going home “a week forward.” That
he would of himself make the abstract past or future, as the
Abbé Sicard has it, by throwing the hand back or forward, with-
out specifying any particular period, I am not prepared to
say. The difficulty may be avoided by signing “ my brother
sick done” for “‘ My brother has been sick,” as to imply that
the sickness is a thing finished and done with. Or the ex-
pression of face and gesture may often tell what is meant.
The expression with*which the sign for eating dinner is made
will tell whether the speaker has had his dinner or is going
to it. When anything pleasant or painful is mentioned by
signs, the look will commonly convey the distinction between
remembrance of what is past, and anticipation of what is to
come.
Though the deaf and dumb has, much as we have, an idea of
the connection of cause and effect, he has not, I think, any di-
rect means of distinguishing causation from mere sequence or
simultaneity, except a way of showing by his manner that two
events belong to one another, which can hardly be described in
words, though if he sees further explanation necessary, he has
no difficulty in giving it. Thus he would express the statement
that a man died of drinking, by saying that he “ died, drank,
drank, drank.” If the inquiry were made, “ died, did he ?”’ he
could put the causation beyond doubt by answering, “ yes, he
drank, and drank, and drank!” If he wished to say that the
gardener had poisoned himself, the order of his signs would be,
“vardener dead, medicine bad drank.”’
To “make” is too abstract an idea for the deaf-mute; to
show that the tailor makes the coat, or that the carpenter
makes the table, he would represent the tailor sewing the coat,
and the carpenter sawing and planing the table. Such a: pro-
position as ‘‘ Rain makes the land fruitful” would not come into
his way of thinking; “rain fall, plants grow,” would be his
pictorial expression.!
As an example of the structure of the gesture-language, I
give the words roughly corresponding to the signs by which
the Lord’s Prayer is acted every morning at the Edinburgh In-
1 Steinthal, Spr. der. T., p. 923.
stitution. They were carefully written down for me by the
Director, and I made notes of the signs by which the various
ideas were expressed in this school. “ Father’ is represented
in the prayer as “man old,” though in ordinary matters he is
generally “the man who shaves himself ;” “name” is, as I have
seen it elsewhere, touching the forehead and imitating the
action of spelling on the fingers, as to say, “‘ the spelling one is
known by.” To “hallow” is to “speak good of” (“ good”
being expressed by the thumb, while “ bad” is represented by
the little finger, two signs of which the meaning hes im the
contrast of the larger and more powerful thumb with the
smaller and less important little finger). “‘ Kingdom” is shown
by the sign for “ crown ;” “ will,” by placing the hand on the
stomach, in accordance with the natural and wide-spread
theory that desire and passion are located there, to which
theory such expressions belong as “to have no stomach to it.”
“Done” is “worked,” shown by hands as working. The
phrase “on earth as it is im heaven ”? was, I believe, put by
signs for “on earth” and “in heaven,” and then by putting
out the two fore-fingers side by side, the sign for sameness and
similarity all the world over, so that the whole would stand,
“ earth on, heaven in, just the same.” “ Trespass” is ‘‘ domg
bad;” to “ forgive” is to rub out, as from a slate; “ tempta-
tion” is plucking one by the coat, as to lead him slily into
mischief. The alternative “but” is made with the two fore-
fingers, not alongside of one another as in “like,” but opposed
point to point, Sicard’s sign for “against.” “ Deliver” is
to “ pluck out,” “ glory” is “ glittering,” “ for ever” is shown
by making the fore-fingers held horizontally turn round and
round one another.
The order of the signs is much as follows :—‘ Father our,
heaven in—name thy hallowed—kingdom thy come—will thy
done—earth on, heaven in, as. Bread give us daily—trespasses
our forgive us, them trespass against us, forgive, as. ‘Temp-
tation lead not—but evil deliver from—kingdom power glory
thine for ever.”
When I write down descriptions in words of the deaf-and-
dumb signs, they seem bald and weak, but it must be remem-
bered that I can only write down the skeletons of them. To
see them is something very different, for these dry bones have
to be covered with flesh. Not the face only, but the whole
body joins in giving expression tothe sign. Nor are the sober,
restrained looks and gestures to which we are accustomed in
our daily life sufficient for this. He who talks to the deaf-and-
dumb in their own language, must throw off the rigid covering
. that the Englishman wears over his face like a tragic mask,
that never changes its expression while love and hate, joy and
sorrow, come out from behind it,
Religious service is performed in signs in many deaf-and-
dumb schools. In the Berlin Institution, the simple Lutheran
service, a prayer, the gospel for the day, anda sermon, is acted
every Sunday morning in the gesture-language for the children
in the school and the deaf-and-dumb inhabitants of the city,
and it is a very remarkable sight. No one could see the
parable of the man who left the ninety and nine sheep in the
wilderness, and went after that which was lost, or of the wo-
man who lost the one piece of silver, performed in expressive
pantomime by a master in the art, without acknowledging that
for telling a simple story and making simple comments on it,
spoken language stands far behind acting. The spoken narra-
tive must lose the sudden anxiety of the shepherd when he
counts his flock and finds a sheep wanting, his hurried penning
up the rest, his running up hill and down dale, and spying
backwards and forwards, his face lighting up when he catches
sight of the missing sheep in the distance, his carrying it home
in his arms, hugging it as he goes. We hear these stories
read as though they were lists of generations of antediluvian
patriarchs. The deaf-and-dumb pantomime calls to mind the
“action, action, action!” of Demosthenes,
THE STONE AGE—PAST AND PRESENT.
Tue Stone Age is that period in the history of mankind during
which stone is habitually used as a material for weapons and
tools. Antiquaries find it convenient to make the Stone Age
cease whenever metal implements come into common use, and
the Bronze Age, or the Iron Age, supervenes. But the last
traces of a Stone Age are hardly known to disappear anywhere,
in spite of the general use of metals; and in studying this
phase of the world’s history for itself, it may be considered as
still existing, not only among savages who have not fairly come
to the use of iron, but even among civilized nations. Wher-
ever the use of stone instruments, as they were used in the
Stone Age proper, is to be found, there the Stone Age has not
entirely passed away. The stone hammers with which tinkers
might be found at work till lately in remote districts in Ire-
land,! the huge stone mallets with wooden handles which are
still used in Iceland for driving posts and other heavy hammer-
ing,” and the lancets of obsidian with which the Indians of
Mexico still bleed themselves, as their fathers used to do before
the Spanish Conquest,’ are stone implements which have sur-
vived for centuries the general introduction of iron.
Mere natural stones, picked up and used without any arti-
ficial shaping at all, are implements of a very low order. Such
1 Wilde, Cat. of Mus. of R. I. Acad. ; Dublin, 1857, p. 80.
2 Klemm, ‘ Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft ;? Leipzig & Sondershausen, 1855-8,
part ii. p. 86. 3 Brasseur, ‘ Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 640,
natural tools are often found in use, being for the most part
slabs, water-worn pebbles, and other stones suited for hammers
and anvils, and their employment is no necessary proof of a
very low state of culture. Among the lower races, Dr. Milligan
gives a good instance of their use, in describing the shell-
mounds left by the natives on the shores of Van Diemen’s
Land. In places where the shells found are univalves, round
stones of different sizes are met with ; one, the larger, on which
they broke the shells ; the other, and smaller, havimg served as
the hammer to break them with. But where the refuse-mounds
consist of oysters, mussels, cockles, and other bivalves, there
flint-knives, used to open them with, are generally found.! Sir
George Grey’s description of the sites of native encampments,
so frequently met with in Australia, will serve as another ex-
ample. The remains of such an encampment consist of a circle
of large flat stones arranged round the place where the fire has
been ; on each of the flat stones a smaller stone for breaking
shell-fish ; beside each pair of stones a large shell used for a
cup, and, scattered all around, broken shells and bones of
kangaroos.”
Nor are cases hard to find of the use of these very low repre-
sentatives of the Stone Age carried up into higher levels of
civilization. Thus the tribes of Central and Southern Africa,
though often skilful in smith’s work, have not come thoroughly
to the use of the iron hammer and anvil. ‘Travellers describe
them as forging their weapons and tools with a stone of handy
shape and size, on a lump of rock which serves as an anvil;
while sometimes an iron hammer is used to give the last finish.?
The quantities of smooth rolled pebbles found in our ancient
English hill-forts were probably collected for sling-stones ; but
larger pebbles, very likely used as cracking-stones, are found
in early European grayes.* At the present day, the inhabitants
of Heligoland and Riigen not only turn to account the natural
net-sinkers formed by chalk-flints, out of which the remains of a
: Milligan, i in Tr. Eth. Soc. ; London, 1863, vol. ii. p. 128.
? Grey, Journals, vol. i. pp. 71, 109.
3 Casalis, p. 131; Petherick, p. 395; Burton, Central Agere. vol. ii. p. 312;
Backhouse, Africa, p. 377. 4 Klemm, C. W., part ii. p. 87.
sponge, or such thing, has been washed, leaving a convenient
hole through the flint to tie it by; but they have been known
to turn such a perforated flmt mto a hammer, by fixing a
handle in the hole.!_ And lastly, the women who shell almonds
in the south of France still use a smooth water-worn pebble
(cowede, couedou), as their implement for breaking the shells.
The distinction between natural and artificial implements is of
no practical value in estimating the state of culture of a Stone-
Age tribe. A natural chip or fragment of stone may have been
now and then used as an edged or pointed tool; but we have
not the least knowledge of any tribe too low habitually to shape
such instruments for themselves. There is, however, a well-
marked line of distinction in the Stone Age which divides it
into a lower and a higher section. We have no historical know-
ledge of any tribe who have used stone instruments, and have
not been in the habit of grinding or polishing some of them,
But there are remains which clearly prove the existence of such
tribes, and thus the Stone Age falls into two divisions, the Un-
ground Stone Age and the Ground Stone Age.”
To the former and ruder of these two classes belong the in-
struments of the Drift or Quaternary deposits, and of the early
bone caves, and, in great part at least, those of the Scandinavian
shell-heaps or kjékkenméddings. Even should a few ground
instruments prove to belong to these deposits, the case would
not be much altered, for the finding of hundreds of unground
implements unmixed with ground ones would still show a vast
predominance of chipping over grinding, which would justify
their being classed in an Unground Stone Age, quite distinct
from the Ground Stone Age in which modern tribes have been
found living.
The rude flint implements found in the drift gravels of the
Quaternary (i. e. Post-Tertiary) series of strata, belong to the
earliest known productions of: human art. Since the long un-
appreciated labours of M. Boucher de Perthes showed the histo-
rical importance of these relics, the date of the first appearance
of man on the earth has been’much debated. I have no pur-
pose of attempting to discuss the collection of geological and
1 Klemm, C. W., part ii. p. 12. 2 See Mr. Lubbock’s Lectures, etc.
Oy)
antiquarian fact and argument brought forward in Sir Charles
Lyell’s ‘ Antiquity of Man,’ not only with reference to the men
of the drift period, but to those of the bone caves, and of the
early shell-heaps and peat-bogs. Butit may be remarked that
geological evidence, though capable of showing the lapse of vast
periods of time, has scarcely admitted of these periods being
brought into definite chronological terms ; yet it is only geolo-
gical evidence that has given any basis for determining the
absolute date at which the makers of the drift implements lived
in France and England. In an elaborate paper lately pub-
lished, Mr. Prestwich infers, from the time it must have taken
to excavate the river-valleys, even under conditions much more
favourable than now to such action, and to bore into the under-
lying strata the deep pipes or funnels now found lined with
sand and gravel, that a very long period must have elapsed
since the implement-bearing beds began to be laid down. But
his opinion is against extreme estimates, and favours the view
that the now undoubted contemporaneity of man with the mam-
moth, the Lhinoceros tichorhinus, etc., is rather to be accounted
for by considering that the great animals continued to live to a
later period than had been supposed, than that the age of man
on earth is to be stretched to fit with an enormous hypothetical
date. Mr. Prestwich thus sums up his view of the subject,
“That we must greatly extend our present chronology with
respect to the first existence of man appears inevitable; but
that we should count by hundreds of thousands of years is, I am
convinced, in the present state of the inquiry, unsafe and pre-
mature.”
A set of characteristic drift implements? would consist of
certain tapering instruments like huge lance-heads, shaped,
edged, and pointed, by taking off a large number of facets, in
a way which shows a good deal of skill and feeling for sym-
metry ; smaller leaf-shaped instruments ; flints partly shaped
and edged, but with one end left unwrought, evidently for hold-
ing in the hand; scrapers with curvilinear edges; rude flake-
‘ Prestwich, On the Geological Position and Age of the Flint-Implement-Bear-
ing Beds, etc. (from Phil. Trans.) ; London, 1864.
* See Evans, ‘ Flint Implements in the Drift ;’ London, 1862.
knives, etc. Taken as a whole, such a set of types would be
very unlike, for instance, to a set of chipped instruments be-
longing to the comparatively late period of the cromlechs in
France and England. But a comparison of particular types
with what is found elsewhere, breaks down any imaginary line
of severance between the men of the Drift and the rest of the
human species. The flake knives are very rude, but they are
like what are found elsewhere, and there is no break in the
series which ends in the beautiful specimens from Mexico and
Scandinavia. The Tasmanians sometimes used for cutting or
notching wood a very rude instrument. Hye-witnesses describe
how they would pick up a suitable flat stone, knock off chips
from one side, partly or all round the edge, and use it without
more ado; and there is a specimen corresponding exactly to
this description in the Taunton Museum. An implement found
in the Drift near Clermont would seem to be much lke this.
The drift tools with a chipped curvilinear edge at one end,
which were probably used for dressing leather and other scrap-
ing, are a good deal like specimens from America. The leaf-
shaped instruments of the Drift differ principally from those of
the Scandinavian shell-heaps, and of America, in being made
less neatly and by chipping off larger flakes; and there are
leaf-shaped instruments which were used by the Mound- Builders
of North America, perhaps for fixing as teeth in a war-club in
Mexican fashion,' which differ rather in finish than in shape
from the Drift specimens. Hvyen the most special type of the
Drift, namely, the pointed tapermg implement lke a great
spear-head, differs from some American implements only in be-
ing much rougher and heavier. There have been found in Asia
stone implements resembling most closely the best marked of
the Drift types. Mr. J. E. Taylor, British Consul at Basrah,
obtained some years ago from the sun-dried brick mound of
Abu Shahrein in Southern Babylonia, two taper pointed instru
ments’ of chipped flint, which, to judge from a cast of one oi’
them, would be passed without hesitation as drift implements.
As to the date to which these remarkable specimens belong,
1 Squier & Davis, p. 211.
2 Vaux, in Proce. Soe. Ant., Jan. 19, 1860.
0 2
there is no sufficient evidence. Again, a stone instrument,
found in a cave at Bethlehem, does not differ specifically from
the Drift type.
With the Unground Stone Age of the Drift, that of the
Bone Caves is intimately connected. In the Drift, geological
evidence shows that a long period of time must have been re-
quired for the accumulation of the beds which overle the flint
implements, for the cutting out of the valleys to their present
state, and so on, since the time when the makers of these rude
tools and weapons inhabited France and England in company
with the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, the mammoth, and other
great animals now extinct. In the Bone Caves this natural
calendar of strata accumulated and removed is absent, but
their animal remains border on the fauna of the Drift, and the
Drift series of stone implements passes into the Cave series,’
so that the men of the Drift may very well be the makers of
some Cave implements contemporaneous with the great quater-
nary mammals.
The explorations made with such eminent skill and success
in the caverns of M. Périgord by Mr. Lartet and Christy,” bring
into view a wonderfully distinct picture of rude tribes inhabit-
ing the south of France, at a remote period characterized by a
fauna strangely different from that at present belonging to the
district, the reindeer, the aurochs, the chamois, and so forth.
They seem to have been hunters and fishers, having no domes-
ticated animals, not even the dog; but they made themselves
rude ornaments, they sewed with needles with eyes, and they
decorated their works in bone, not only with hatched and waved
patterns, but with carvings of animals done with considerable
skill and taste. Yet their stone implements were very rude,
to a great extent belonging to absolute Drift types, and desti-
tute of grinding, with one curious set of exceptions, certain
granite pebbles with a smooth hollowed cavity, some of which
resemble stones used by the Australians for grinding some-
1 See, for instance, W. Boyd Dawkins, in Proc. Somersetshire Archzological
Soc., 1861-2, p. 197.
° Lartet & Christy, ‘Cavernes du Périgord ;’ Paris, 1864 (from ‘ Revue Archéo-
logique’).
thing in, perhaps paint to adorn themselves with. It is very
curious to find these French tribes going so far in the art of
shaping tools by grinding, and yet, so far as we know, never
catching the idea of grinding a celt.
The stone implements of the Scandinavian shell-heaps are a
good deal like those ,of the Drift and the Caves, as regards
their flint-flakes and leaf-shaped instruments, but they are
characterized by the frequent occurrence of a kind of celt
which is not a Drift type. It is rudely shaped from the flint,
the natural fracture of which gives it a curved form which may
be roughly compared to that of a man’s front tooth, if it ta-
pered from root to edge.! Here, also, the Unground Stone
Age prevails, though a very few specimens of higher types
have been found. I may quote Mr. Christy’s opinion that the
thousands of characteristic implements are to be taken as the
standard of what was made and used, while, as has very often
happened in old deposits lying in accessible situations, a few
things may have got in in comparatively modern times.
Beside the want of grinding, the average quality of the
instruments of the Unground Stone Age is very low, not-
withstanding that its best specimens are far above the level of
the worst of the later period. These combined characters of
rudeness and the absence of grinding give the remains of the
Unground Stone Age an extremely important bearmg on the
history of Civilization, from the way in which they bring to-
gether evidence of great rudeness and great antiquity. The
antiquity of the Drift implements is, as has been said, proved
by direct geological evidence. The Cave implements, even of
the reindeer period, are proved by their fauna to be earlier, as
they are seen at a glance to be ruder, than those of the crom-
lech period, and of the earliest lake-dwellings of Switzerland,
both belonging to the Ground Stone Age. To the student who
views Human Civilization as in the main an upward develop-
ment, a more fit starting-point could scarcely be offered than
this wide and well-marked progress from an earlier and lower,
to a later and higher, stage of the history of human art.
1 Lubbock in Nat. Hist. Review, Oct. 1861. Morlot in Soc, Vaudoise des Se.
Nat., 1859
To turn now to the productions of the higher or Ground
Stone Age, grinding is found rather to supplement chipping
than to supersede it. Implements are very commonly chipped
into shape before they are ground, and unfinished articles of this
kind are often found. Moreover, such things as flake-knives,
and heads for spears and arrows, have seldom or never been
ground in any period, early or late, for the obvious reason that
the labour of grinding them would have been wasted, or worse.
Flake-knives of obsidian appear to have been sometimes
finished by grinding in Mexico,! but most stone knives of the
kind seem to have been used as they were flaked off. This
question of grinding or not grinding stone implements 1s
brought out clearly by some remarks of Captain Cook’s, on his
first voyage to the South Seas. He noticed that the natives of
Tahiti used basalt to make their adzes of, and these it was ne-
cessary to sharpen almost every minute, for which purpose a
stone and a cocoa-nut shell full of water were kept always at
hand. When he saw the New Zealanders using, for the finish-
ing of their nicest work, small tools of jasper, chipped off from
a block in sharp angular pieces like a gunflint, and throwing
them away as soon as they were blunted, he concluded they
did not grind them afresh because they could not.? This, how-
ever, was not the true reason, as their grinding jade and other
hard stones clearly shows; but it was simply easier to make
new ones than to grind the old. A good set of implements of
the Ground Stone Age will consist partly of instruments made ~
by mere chipping, such as varieties of spear-heads, arrow-heads,
and flake-knives, and partly of ground implements, the principal
classes of which are celts, axes, and hammers.
The word celt: (Latin celtis, a chisel) is a convenient term
for including the immense mass of instruments which have the
simple shape of chisels, and might have been used as such. No
doubt many or most of them were really for mounting on han-
dies, and using as adzes or axes; but in the absence of a han-
dle, or a place for one, or amark where one has been, it is often
impossible to set down any particular specimen as certainly
1 Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana;’ Seville, 1615, vol. ii. p- 527.
? Cook, First Voy. H.,, vol. ii. p. 220; vol. iii. p. 60,
a chisel, an axe, or an adze. When, however, the cutting edge
is hollowed as in a gouge, it is no longer possible to use it as
an axe, though it retains the other two possible uses of chisel
and adze. The water-worn pebble, in which a natural edge has
been made straighter and sharper by grinding, may be taken
as the original and typical form of the celt. Rude South Ame-
rican tribes select suitable water-worn stones and rub down
their edges, sometimes merely grasping them in the hand to
use them, and sometimes mounting them in a wooden handle;
and axes made in this way, by grinding the edge of a suitable
pebble, and fixing it in a withe handle, are known in Australia.
Moreover, the class to which this almost natural instrument
belongs, that, namely, which has a double-convex cross sec-
tion, is far more numerous and universally distributed than the
double-flat, concavo-convex, triangular, or other forms.
Where artificially-shaped celts are found only chipped over,
in high Stone Age deposits, as in Scandinavia, they are ge-
nerally to be considered as unfinished ; but when celts of hard
stone are found only ground near the edge, and otherwise left
rough from chipping, they may be taken as denoting a rude
state of art. Thus flint celts ground only near the edge are
found in Northern Europe, and even in Denmark ; but in general
celts of the hardest stone are found, during the Ground-Stone
Age, conscientiously ground and polished all over, and every
large celt of hard stone which is finished to this degree repre-
sents weeks or months of labour, done not so much for any
technical advantage, as for the sake of beauty and artistic
completeness.
The primitive hammer, still used in some places, is an oval
pebble, held in the hand. Above this comes the natural peb-
ble, or the artificially-shaped stone, which is grooved or notched
to have a bent withe fastened round it as a handle, as our smiths
mount heavy chisels. Above this again is the highest kind,
the stone hammer with a hole through it for the handle. This
is not found out of the Old World, perhaps not out of Kurope;
and even the Mexicans, who in many things rivalled or excelled
the stone-workers of ancient Europe, do not seem to have got
beyond grooving their hammers. The stone axe proper, as |
distinguished from the mere celt by its more complex shape,
and by its being bored or otherwise fitted for a handle, is best
represented in the highest Huropean Stone Age, and in the
transition to the Bronze Age.
Special instruments and varieties are of great interest to the
Ethnographer, as giving individuality to the productions of the
Stone Age of different times and places. Thus, the rude trian-
gular flakes of obsidian with which the Papuans head their
spears are very characteristic of their race. These spears were
probably what they were using in Schouten’s time; “ long
staves with very lone sharpe things at the ends thereof, which
(as we thought) were finnes of black fishes.””! Among celts,
the Polynesian adze blade, to be seen in almost any museum, .
is a well-marked type; as isthe American double hatchet,” and
an elaborately-formed American knife.? The Pech’s knives or
Pict’s knives, of Shetland, made from a rock with a slaty
cleavage, seem peculiar. They appear to be efficient imstru-
ments, as an old woman was seen cutting cabbage with one not
long since.
As there are a good many special instruments like these in
different parts of the world, the idea naturally suggests itself of
trying to use them as ethnological evidence, to prove connexion
or intercourse between two districts where a similar thing is
found. For instance, among the most curious phenomena in
the history of stone implements is the occurrence of one of the
highest types of the Stone Age, the polished celt of green jade,
of all places in the world, in Australia, where the general cha-
racter of the native stone implements is so extremely low.
There is a quarry of this very hard and beautiful stone in Vic-
toria, and the natives on the river Glenelg grind it into double-
convex hatchet blades, a process which must require great la-
bour, and these blades they fix with native thread into cleft
sticks, and use them as battle-axes. Two of the blades in
question are in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries
in Edinburgh, presented by Dr. Mackay, who got them near
1 Purchas, vol. i. p. 95. * Schoolcraft, part ii. pl. 48, figs. 1 and 2.
* Id., part ii. pl. 45, figs. 1-3. Another specimen in the Edinburgh Antiquaries’
Museum, presented by Dr. Daniel Wilson.
the place where they were made. They are only inferior
to the finest celts of the same material from New Zealand,
in wanting the accuracy of outline which the Maori would have
given, and the conscientious labour with which he would have
ground down the whole surface till every inequality or flaw
had disappeared, whereas the Australian has been content
with polishing into the hollow places, instead of grinding them
out. Were we obliged to infer, from the presence of these
high-class celts in Australia, that the natives in one part of the
country had themselves developed the making of stone imple-
ments so immensely beyond the rest of their race, while they
remained in other respects in the same low state of civilization,
the quality of stone implements would have to be pretty much
given up as a test of culture anywhere. Fortunately there is
an easier way out of the difficulty. Polished instruments of
this green jade have been, long ago or recently, one of the
most important items of manufacture in the islands of the
Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and the South Australians may
have learnt from some Malay or Polynesian source the art of
shaping these high-class weapons. The likelihood of this being
their real history is strengthened by proofs we have of inter-
course between Australia and the surrounding islands. Besides
the known yearly visits of the trepang-fishers of Macassar to
the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the appearance of the outrigger-
canoe in Hast Australia in Captain Cook’s time, there is my-
thological evidence which seems to carry proof of connexion far
down the east coast.
Another coincidence of this kind may be mentioned here,
though in the absence of collateral evidence it would be un-
wise to draw any conclusion from it. There is a well-known
New Zealand weapon, the mére, or pdtu-patu. It is an edged
club of bone or stone, which has been compared to a beaver’s
tail, or is still more like a soda-water bottle with the bulb
flattened, and it is a very effective weapon in a hand-to-hand
fight, beg so sharp that a man’s skull may be split at one
blow with it. Through the neck it has a hole for a wrist-cord.
The mére is made of the bone of a whale, or of stone, and the
finest, which are of green jade and worked with immense
labour, were among the most precious heirlooms of the Maori
Chiefs. One would think that such a peculiar weapon was
hardly likely to be made independently by
two races; but Klemm gives a drawing of a
sharp-edged Peruvian weapen, of dark brown
jasper,' which is so exactly like the New Zea-
land mére, even to the wrist-cord, that a single
drawing of one of the latter, shown in front
and profile in Fig. 19, will serve for both.
There can hardly be a mistake about this
weapon being really Peruvian, for another
from Cuzco, of a greenish amphibolic stone,
is figured by Rivero and Tschudi,? curiously
enough, in company with a wooden war-club,
Fig. 19. from Tunga in Colombia which is hardly distin-
guishable from a common Polynesian form. If we knew of any
connexion between the civilizations of Peru and the South Sea
Islands, these extraordinary resemblances might be accounted
for without hesitation, as caused by direct transmission.
When, however, their full value has been given to the dif-
ferences in the productions of the Ground Stone Age, there
remains a residue of a most remarkable kind. In the first
place, a very small number of classes, flake-knives, scrapers,
spear and arrow-heads, celts and hammers, take in the great
mass of specimens in museums; and in the second place, the
prevailing character of these implements, whether modern or
thousands of years old, whether found on this side of the world
or the other, is a marked uniformity. The Ethnographer who
has studied the stone implements of Europe, Asia, North or
South America, or Polynesia, may consider the specimens from
the district he has studied, as types from which those of other
districts differ, as a class, by the presence or absence of a few
peculiar instruments, and individually in more or less impor-
tant details of shape and finish, unless, as sometimes happens,
they do not perceptibly differ at all. So great is this uni-
formity in the stone implements of different places and times,
' Klemm, C. W., part ii. p. 26.
? Rivero & Tschudi, Ant. Per. Plates, pl. xxxiii. -
that it goes far to neutralize their value as distinctive of dif-
ferent races. It is clear that no great help in tracing the
minute history of the growth and migration of tribes, is to be
got from an arrow-head which might have come from Pata-
gonia, or Siberia, or the Isle of Man, or from a celt which
might be, for all its appearance shows, Mexican, Irish, or
Tahitian. If an observer, tolerably acquainted with stone
implements, had an unticketed collection placed before him,
the largeness of the number of specimens which he would not
confidently assign, by mere inspection, to their proper coun-
tries, would serve as a fair measure of their general uniformity.
Even when aided by mineralogical knowledge, often a great
help, he would have to leave a large fraction of the whole in
an unclassed heap, confessing that he did not know within
thousands of miles or thousands of years, where and when
they were made.
How, then, is this remarkable uniformity to be explained ?
The principle that man does the same thing under the same
circumstances will account for much, but it is very doubtful
whether it can be stretched far enough to account for even the
greater proportion of the facts in question. The other side of
the argument is, of course, that resemblance is due to con-
nexion, and the truth is made up of the two, though in what
proportions we do not know. It may be that, though the pro-
blem is too obscure to be worked out alone, the uniformity of
development in different regions of the Stone Age may some
day be successfully brought in with other lines of argument,
based on deep-lying agreements in culture, which tend to
centralize the early history of races of very unlike appearance,
and living in widely distant ages and countries.
To turn to an easier branch of the subject, I have brought
together here, as a contribution to the history of the Stone
Age, a body of evidence which shows that it has prevailed in
ancient or up to modern times, in every great district of the
inhabited world. By the aid of this, it may be possible to
sketch at least some rude outline of the history of its gradual
decline and fall, which followed on the introduction of metal in
later periods, up to our own times, when the universal use of
iron has left nothing of the ancient state of things, except a few
remnants of interest to ethnologists and antiquaries, but of no
practical importance to the world at large.
In the first place, there are parts of the world whose inha-
bitants, when they were discovered in modern times by more
advanced races, were found not possessed of metals, but using
stone, shell, bone, split canes, and so forth, for purposes in
making tools and weapons to which we apply metals. Now as
we have no evidence that the inhabitants of Australia, the
South Sea Islands, and a considerable part of North and South
America, had ever been possessed of metals, it seems reason-
able to consider these districts as countries where original
Stone Age conditions had never been interfered with, until
they came within the range of European discovery.
But in other parts of North and South America, such inter-
ference had already taken place before the time of Columbus.
The native copper of North America had been largely used by
the race known to us as the “ Mound Builders,’ who have left
as memorials of their existence the enormous mounds and
fortifications of the Mississippi Valley.! They do not seem to
have understood the art of melting copper, or even of forging
it hot, but to have treated it as a kind of malleable stone,
which they got in pieces out of the ground, or knocked off
from the great natural blocks, and hammered into knives,
chisels, axes, and ornaments. The use of native copper was
by no means confined to the Mound Builders, for the European
explorers found it in use for knives, ice-chisels, ornaments,
etc., in the northern part of the continent, especially among
the Hsquimaux and the Canadian Indians.?, The copper which
Captain Cook found in abundance among the Indians of Prince
William’s Sound, was no doubt native. Even meteoric iron
has been found in use among the Esquimaux. There is a
harpoon-point of walrus tusk in the British Museum, headed
1 See Squier & Davis, ete.
? Squier, Abor. Mon. of State of N. Y., Smithsonian Contr. ; Washington,
1851, pp. 176-7. Sir J. Richardson, ‘The Polar Regions ;’ Edinburgh, 1861)
p- 308. Hakluyt, vol. ini. p. 230. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 18.
* Cook, Third Voy., vol. ii. p. 380.
with a blade of meteoric iron, and a knife, also of tusk, which
is edged by fixing in a row of chips of meteoric iron along a
groove. But these instruments do not appear old; they are
just like those in which the Hsquimaux at present mount
morsels of Huropean iron, and there is no evidence that they
used their native meteoric iron, until their intercourse with
Europeans in modern times had taught them the nature and
use of the metal. It is indeed very strange that there should
be no traces found among them of knowledge of metal-work,
and of other arts, which one would expect a race so receptive
of foreign knowledge to have got from contact with the
Northmen, in the tenth and following centuries; but I have
not succeeded in finding any distinct evidence of the kind.
In the lower part of the Northern Continent, in Peru and
some other districts of the Southern, the Stone Age was not
extinct at the time of Columbus; it was indeed in a state of
development hardly surpassed anywhere in the world, but at
the same time several metals were in common use. Gold and
silver were worked with wonderful skill, but chiefly for orna-
mental purposes. Though almost all the gold and silver work
of Mexico has long ago gone to the melting-pot, there are still
a few specimens which show that the Spanish conquerors were
not romancing in the wonderful stories they told of the skill
of the native goldsmiths. I have seen a pair of gold eagle orna-
ments in the Berlin Museum, which will compare almost with
the Etruscan work for design and delicacy of finish. But what
is still more important is that bronze, made of well-judged pro-
portions of copper and tin, was in use on both continents.
The Peruvians used bronze, and perhaps copper also, for tools
and weapons. ‘The Mexican bronze axe-blades are to be seen
in collections, and we know by the picture-writings that both
the Mexicans! and the builders of the ruined cities of Central
America,? mounted them by simply sticking them into a
wooden club, as the modern African mounts his iron axe-blade.
The little bronze bells of Mexico? and South America are cored
castings, which are by no means novice’s work, and other
1 Mendoza Codex, in Kingsborough, vol. i. 2 Dresden Codex, id.
3 Tylor, ‘ Mexico ;’ p, 236.
bronze castings from the latter country are even more remark-
able.}
How the arts of working gold, silver, copper, and bronze
came into America, we do not know, nor can we even tell
whether their appearance on the Northern and Southern Con-
tinent was independent or not. It is possible to trace Mexican
connexion down to Nicaragua, and perhaps even to the Isth-
mus of Panama, while on the other hand the northern inhabi-
tants of South,America were not unacquainted with the na-
tions farther down the continent. But no certain proof of
connexion or intercourse of any kind between Mexico and
Peru seems as yet to have been made out. All that we know
certainly is that gold, silver, copper, tin, and bronze had there
intruded themselves among the implements and ornaments of
worked stone, though they had scarcely made an approach to
driving them out of use, and that the traditions of both conti-
nents ascribed their higher culture to certain foreigners who
were looked upon as supernatural beings. If we reason upon
the supposition that these remarkably unanimous legends may
perhaps contain historical, in combination with mythical ele-
ments, the question suggests itself, where, for a thousand or
fifteen hundred years before the Spanish discovery, were men
to be found who could teach the Mexicans and Peruvians to
make bronze, and could not teach them to smelt and work
iron? The people of Asia seem the only men on whose behalf
such a claim can be sustained at all. The Massagetee of Cen-
tral Asia were in the Bronze Age in the time of Herodotus,
who, describing their use of bronze for spear and arrow-heads,
battle-axes, and other things, and of gold rather for ornamental
purposes, remarks that they make no use of iron or silver, for
they have none in their country, while gold and bronze abound.”
Four centuries later, Strabo modifies this remark, saying that
they have no silver, little iron, but abundance of gold and
bronze. The Tatars were in the Iron Age when visited by
medizeval travellers, and the history of the transition from
bronze to iron in Central Asia, of which we seem to have here
1 Ewbank, ‘ Brazil ;> New York, 1856, pp. 454-463.
2 Herod., i. 215. 3 Strabo, xi. 8, 6.
a glimpse, is for the most part obscure. The matter is, how-
ever, the more worthy of remark from its bearing on the argu-
ment for the connexion of the culture of Mexico and that of
Asia, grounded by Humboldt on the similarities in the mytho-
logy and the calendar of the two districts.
If we now turn to the history of the Stone Age in Asia,
Africa, and Europe, we shall indeed find almost everywhere
evidence of a Stone Period, which preceded a Bronze or Iron
Period, but this.is only to be had in small part from the direct
inspection of races living without metal implements. The
Kamchadals of north-eastern Asia, a race as yet ethnologically
isolated, were found by the Kosak invaders using cutting-tools
of stone and bone. It is recorded that with these instruments
it took them three years to hollow out a canoe, and one year
to scoop out one of the wooden troughs in which they cooked
their food ;! but probably a large allowance for exaggeration
must be made in this story. Itis curious to notice that, thirty
or forty years ago, Erman got in Kamchatka one of the Stone
Age relics found in such enormous numbers in Mexico, a fluted
prism of obsidian, off which a succession of stone blades had
been flaked; but though one would have thought that the
comparatively recent use of stone instruments in the country
would have been still fresh in the memory of the people, the
natives who dug it up had no idea what it was.? Stone knives,
moreover, have been found in the high north-east of Siberia,
on the site of deserted yourts of modern date, said to have
been occupied by the settled Chukchi, or Shalags.?
In China, the following curious passage seems to record a
comparatively modern use of stone implements. Referring to
Nan-hiu-fu, in the province of Kwan-tong, in Southern China,
it is stated, “‘ They find, in the mountains and among the rocks
which surround it, a heavy stone, so hard that hatchets and
other cutting instruments are made from it.”’4 It is to be
remembered that China is not inhabited only by the race
usually known to us as the Chinese, but by another, or several
1 Kracheninnikow, p. 29. 2 Erman, ‘ Reise,’ vol. iii. p. 453.
3 Sarytschew, in Coll. of Mod. ete., Voy. and Tr.; London, 1807, vol. y. p. 35.
4 Grosier, ‘ Dela Chine ;’ Paris, 1818, vol. i. p. 191.
other far less cultured races ; the mountains of Kwan-tong and
the other southern provinces being especially inhabited by such
rude and seemingly aboriginal tribes. There is, besides, a Chi-
nese tradition speaking of the use of stone for weapons among
themselves in early times, which implies at least the knowledge
that thisis a state of things characterizing a race at a low stage
of culture, and may really embody a recollection of their own
early history ; Fu-hi, they say, made weapons. These were of
wood, those of Shin-nung were of stone, and Chi-yu made
metal ones.!
Among the great Tatar race to which the Turks and Mon-
gols, and our Hungarians, Lapps, and Finns belong, accounts
of a Stone Age may be found, in the most remarkable of which
the widely prevailing idea that stone instruments found buried
in the ground are thunderbolts, is very well brought into view.
In the Chinese Encyclopedia of the emperor Kang-hi, who
began to reign in 1662, the following passage occurs :—
*« ¢ Tightning-stones.’-—The shape and substance of lightning-
stones vary according to place. The wandering Mongols,
whether of the coasts of the eastern sea, or the neighbourhood
of the Sha-mo, use them in the manner of copper and steel.
There are some of these stones which have the shape of a
hatchet, others that of a knife, some are made like mallets.
These lightning-stones are of different colours; there are
blackish ones, others are greenish. A romance of the time of
the Tang, says that there was at Yu-men-si a great Miao de-
dicated to the Thunder, and that the people of the country
used to make offerings there of different things, to get some of
these stones. This fable is ridiculous. The lightning-stones are
metals, stones, pebbles, which the fire of the thunder has meta-
morphosed by splitting them suddenly and uniting inseparably
different substances. There are some of these stones in which
a kind of vitrification is distinctly to be observed.’’?
Moreover, within the last century the Tunguz of North-
Eastern Siberia, belonging to the same Tatar race, were using
? Goguet, vol. iii. p. 331.
* «Mémoires concernant |’ Histoire, ete., des Chinois, par les Missionnaires de
Pékin ;’ Paris, 1776, ete., vol.iv. p. 474. Klemm, C. G., vol. vi. p. 467.
stone arrow-heads,' while Tacitus long before made a similar
remark as to their relatives the Finns, whose “ only hope is in
their arrows, which, from want of iron, they make sharp with
bones.” ‘Sola in sagittis spes, quas, inopia ferri, ossibus as-
perant.”? But the Tunguz have been expert iron-workers as
long as we have any distinct knowledge of them, and arrow-
heads of stone and bone may survive, for an indefinite number
of centuries, the main part of the Stone Age to which they
properly belong. Even the Egyptians, in the height of their
civilization, used stone arrow-heads in hunting, notwithstanding
their vast wealth of bronze and iron. The peculiar arrows
which are bemg shot at wild oxen in the bas-reliefs of Beni
Hassan$ are still to be seen in collections; they are special as
to their wedge-shaped flint heads, fixed with the broad edge
foremost, a shape like that of the wooden-headed bird-bolts
of the Middle Ages. ‘The stone arrow-heads found on the
battle-field of Marathon are often described, but they may have
all been shot by the barbarian troops, and most others found
in Greece are probably pre-Aryan. It is clear that metal must
be very common and cheap to be used in so wasteful a way as
in heading an arrow, perhaps only for a single shot.
If we go back eighteen hundred years, an account may be
found of a people living under Stone Age conditions in a part
of Asia much less remote than Tartary and China. Strabo
gives the following description of the fish-eaters inhabiting the
coast of the present Beloochistan, on the Arabian Sea, and,
like the Aleutian Islanders of modern times, building their huts
of the bones of whales, with their jaws for doorways :—“~ The
country of the Ichthyophagi is a low coast, for the most part
without trees, except palms, a sort of acanthus, and tamarisks ;
of water and cultivated food there is a dearth. Both the peo-
ple and their cattle eat fish, and drink rain- and well-water,
and the flesh of the cattle tastes of fish. In making their dwell-
ings, they mostly use the bones of whales, and oyster-shells,
the ribs serving for beams and props, and the jaw-bones for
1 Ravenstein, p. 4.
2 Tac. Germ. xlvi. ; and see Grimm, G. D.S%., vol. i. p. 173.
3 Wilkinson, Pop. Aes vol. i, pp. 222, 353.
ye)
doorways; the vertebrae they use form ortars, in which they
pound their sun-dried fish, and of this, with the mixture of
a little corn, they make bread, for, though they have no iron,
they have mills. And this is the less wonderful, seeing that
they can get the mills from elsewhere, but how can they dress
the millstones when worn down? with the stones, they say,
with which they sharpen their arrows and darts [of wood,
with points] hardened in the fire. Of the fish, part they cook
in ovens, but most they eat raw, and they catch them im nets
of palm-bark.’”!
Though direct history gives but partial means of proving the
existence of a Stone Age over Asia and Hurope, the finding of
ancient stone tools and weapons, in almost every district of
these two continents, proves that they were in former times in-
habited by Stone Age races, though whether in any particular
spot the tribes we first find living there are their descendants
as well as their successors, this evidence cannot tell us. How,
for instance, are we to tell what race made and used the ob-
sidian flakes which were found with polished agate and carne-
lian beads under the chief corner-stone of the great temple
of Khorsabad? All through Western Asia, and north of the
Himalaya, stone implements are scattered broadcast through the
land. Further east, the account of the lightning-stones, just
quoted from the Encyclopzedia of Kang-hi, goes to prove that
stone implements are found in China, and therefore that the
inhabitants once made and used them; and this inference espe-
cially makes it probable that the legend of stone weapons
having been once in use may be a piece of genuine traditional
history.
Japan abounds in Stone Age relics, of which Van Siebold
has given drawings and descriptions in his great work ;? and
his own collection at Leyden is very rich in specimens. The
arrow-heads of obsidian, flint, chert, etc., are of types like those
found elsewhere. Their presence is sometimes accounted for
by stories that they were rained from the sky, or that every
1 Strabo, xv. 2, 2.
* Ph. Fr. v. Siebold, Nippon, Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan; Leyden,
1832, etc., part ii. plates xi. to xiii. pp. 45, ete.
year an army of spirits fly through the air with rain and storm ;
when the sky clears, people go out and hunt in the sand for the
stone arrows they have dropped. The arrow-heads are found
most abundantly in the north of the great island of Nippon, in
the so-called land of the Wild Men, a population who were only
late and with difficulty brought under the Mikado dynasty,
and who belong to the same Aino race as the present inha-
bitants of the island of Jesso and the southern Kuriles. In
Japan, stone celts are frequently to be found in the collections
of minerals of native amateurs, and they are still sometimes
dug up with other objects of stone. They seem only of average
symmetry and finish. Here, again, the natives call such a
stone celt a ‘ thunderbolt,” Rai fu seki, or Tengu no masakari,
““battleaxe of Tengu,” Tengu being the guardian of heaven.
The notion is also current that they are implements of the Evil
Spirit, whose symbol is the fox, whence the names of “ Fox-
hatchet,” “ Fox-plane.” As a fox-plane, a double-flat celt is
shown in Siebold’s plates, which may have served the purpose
of a plane, or, if it was fixed to a handle, that of an adze. Re-
gularly shaped stone knives (not mere flakes) are represented ;
some are hke the stone knives of Egypt, but rougher; the
Japanese recognise them as ‘ stone-knives.” Some which
have been dug up are kept in the temples as relics of the time
of the Kami, the spirits or divinities from whom the Japanese
hold themselves to be descended, and whose worship is the old
religion of the Japanese, the way or doctrine of the Kami,
more commonly known by the Chinese term, Sin-tu. Some
stone knives, drawn by Siebold on Japanese authority, seem
to be of a slaty rock, which has admitted of their being very
neatly made in curious shapes. One very highly finished spe-
cimen is called the stone knife of the “Green Dragon,” a term
which may be explained by the fact that the conventional
dragon of Japan has a sword at the end of his tail.
Again, Java abounds in very high-class stone implements,
and such things are found on the Malay peninsula, though in
both these districts the natives, unlike the Polynesians, whose
language is so closely connected with theirs, do not even know
P2
what stone celts are, and hold with so many other nations that
they are thunderbolts.!
In India, an account of the discovery by Mr. H. P. Le Me-
surier of a great number of ancient stone celts was published
in 1861. He found them stored up in villages of the Jubbul-
pore district, near the Mahadeos, and in other sacred places ;
and since then many more have been met with by other ob-
servers.” Mr. Christy’s specimens are ordinary stone celts of
indifferent quality.
In Europe, ancient stone implements are found from east to
west, and from north to south, the relics perhaps of races now
extinct, or absorbed in others, or of the Tatar population of
Finland and Lapland, or of that unclassed race which survives
in the Basque population about the Pyrenees, who, unlike the
Finns and Lapps, cannot as yet claim relationship with a sur-
Viving parent stock.
As to our own Aryan or Indo-European race, our first know-
ledge of it, at the remote period of which a picture has been
reconstructed by the stidy of the Vedas, and a comparison of
the Sanskrit with other Aryan tongues, shows a Bronze Age
prevailing among them when they set out on their migrations
from Central Asia to found the Aryan nations, the Indians,
Persians, Greeks, Germans, and the rest.2 A general view of
the succession of metal to stone all over the world, justifies a
belief that the Aryans were no exception to the general rule,
and that they, too, used stone instruments before they had
metal ones; but there is little known evidence bearing on the
matter beyond that of a few Aryan words, which are worth men-
tioning, though they will not carry much weight of argument.
The nature of this evidence may be made clear, by noticing
how it comes into existence in places where the introduction of
metal is matter of history. In these places it sometimes hap-
1 Yates, in ‘ Archeological Journal,’ No. 42. Earl, Papuans,’ pp. 175-6.
2 Le Mesurier, in Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, 1861, No. 1, p. 81. Theobald,
As. Soc., Apr. 1864, ete. ete.
° Weber, ‘Indische Skizzen;’ Berlin, 1857, p. 9. Max Miiller, Lectures
second series, p. 280,etc.
pens that old words, referring to stone and stone instruments,
are transferred to metal and metal instruments, and these
words take their place as relics of the Stone Age preserved in
language. Thus, in North America the Algonquin names for
copper and brass are miskwaubik and ozawaubik, that is to say,
*“red-stone” and ‘ yellow-stone ;” while the name e-reck, that
is, “stone,” is used by some Indian tribes of California for all
metals indiscriminately. In the Delaware language, opeek is
“white,” and asswun is “stone ;” so that it is evident that the
name of silver, opusswun, means “ white-stone,” while the ter-
mination ‘ stone” is discernible in wisauaasun, ‘ gold.” In the
Mandan language, the words mahi, “knife,” and mahitshuke,
“flint,” are clearly connected.! Having thus examples of the
way in which the Stone Age has left its mark in language, in
races among whom it has been superseded within our know-
ledge, it is natural that we should expect to find words marking
the same change, in the speech of men who made the same
transition in times not clearly known to history. What has
been done in this way as yet comes to very little, but Jacob
Grimm has set an example by citing two words, hammer, Old
Norse hamarr, meaning both “ hammer” and “ rock,” and Latin
saxum, a name possibly belonging to a time when instruments
to cut with, secare, were still of stone, and which still keeps
close to Old German sahs, Anglo-Saxon seaa, a knife. There
may possibly be some connexion between sagitta, arrow, and
saxum, stone, and in like manner between Sanskrit ¢ili, arrow,
gilda, stone, while in the Semitic family of languages, Hebrew
yo, chetz, arrow, ysn, chatzatz, gravel-stone, are both related
to the verb ysn, chatzatz, to cut. But against the inference
from these words, that their connexion belongs to a time when
stone was the usual material for sharp instruments, there les
this strong objection, that knife and stone might get from the
same root names expressing sharpness, or any other quality
they have in common, without having anything directly to do
with one another, while the same word, hamar, may have been
found an equally suitable name for “hammer” and “rock,”
1 Schooleraft, part ii. pp. 389, 397, 463, 506; part ii. pp. 426, 448.
2 Grimm, D. M., p. 165; G.D.S., p. 610.
without the hammer being so called because all hammers were
originally stones.
Among the Semitic race, however, it seems possible to bring
forward better evidence than this of an early Stone Age. If
we follow one way of translating, we find in two passages of
the Old Testament an account of the use of sharp stones or
stone knives for circumcision; Exodus iv. 25, “ And Zipporah
took a stone” ("¥, tzor), and Joshua vy. 2, “ At that time Je-
hovah said to Joshua, Make thee knives of stone” (AINA
DY, charvoth tzurim). As they stand, however, these pas-
sages are not sufficient to prove the case, for there is much
the same ambiguity as to the original meaning of ¢zor, tzur, as
m the etymologies of some of the words just mentioned. Ge-
senius refers them to i¥ tzu, to cut, and the readings “an
edge, a knife,” and “ knives of edges, 7.c. sharp knives,” have
so far at least an equal claim. It remains to be seen which
view is supported by further evidence.
In the first place, the Septuagint altogether favours the
opinion that the knives in question were of stone, by reading
in the first place Wor, a stone, or pebble, and in the second,
Hayaipas TeTpivas éx TéTPAas aKpoTOmoL, stone knives of sharp-
cut stone. These are mentioned again in the remarkable pas-
sage which follows the account of the death and burial of
Joshua (Joshua xxiv. 29-30), “ And it came to pass after these
things, that Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Jehovah,
died, being a hundred and ten years old, and they buried him
in the border of his inheritance in Timnath Serah, which is in
Mount Ephraim, on the north side of the hill of Gaash.” Here
follows in the LXX. a passage not in the Hebrew text which
has come down tous. “Kal éxe? €@nxav pet avtod els TO
pevnpetov év @ EBarrav adtov éxel, Tas payalpas Tas TeTpivas,
év ais TepLéTewe TOVs viovs Iapair év Tarydnrous, ore &Enyayev
avtovs €& Aiyimtou Kaba cvvétake Kipios: Kai éxet eiolv Eas
THs onwepov nuépas.”? ‘ And there they laid with him in the
1 In this connexion see the meanings of agman in Boehtlingk & Roth, and
Benfey, G. W. L., part i. p. 156.
? LXX., Ed. Field, Oxford, 1859, Elsewhere Gilead instead of Gaash, and
other differences,
tomb wherein they buried him there, the stone knives, wherewith
he circumcised the children of Israel at the Gilgals, when he
led them out of Egypt, as the Lord commanded. And they are
there unto this day.’ Any one who is disposed to see in this
statement a late interpolation, may imagine an origin. for it.
The opening of a tumulus containing, as they so commonly do,
a quantity of sharp instruments of stone, might suggest to a
Jew who only knew such things as circumcising knives, the
idea that he saw before him the tomb of Joshua, and, buried
with his body, the stone knives wherewith he circumcised the
children of Israel.
How far the modern Jews follow the translation “ stone,”
“knives of stone,” I cannot entirely say, but two modern
Jewish translations of the Pentateuch which I have consulted
read “ stone” in Exodus iv. 25. It is to be remarked that the
Rabbinical law admits such a use; it stands thus:—
payor 7at bon nema ea den, poo Osa”
san mma om ope eb op Sw myanpan yn
pa pooa pa San Sab snanen yo myo, maser oS
«apa Syd saan omepn
“We may circumcise with anything, even with a flint, with
crystal (glass) or with anything that cuts, except with the
sharp edge of a reed, because enchanters make use of that, or
it may bring on a disease, and it is a precept of the wise men to
circumcise with iron, whether in the form of a knife or of scis-
sors, but it is customary to use a knife.’ Now as Professor
Lazarus, a most competent judge in such matters, remarked
to me with reference to this question, the mere mention of a
practice in the Rabbinical books is not good evidence that it
ever really existed, seeing that their writers habitually exercise
their fertile imaginations in devising cases which might pos-
sibly occur, and then argue upon them as seriously as though
they were real matters of practical importance. But there
are observed facts, which tend to bring these particular ordi-
nances out of the region of fancy, and into that of fact. As
to the prohibition of the use of the reed knife, it is to be no-
ticed that this (in the form of a sharp splinter of bamboo) was
the regular instrument with which circumcision was performed
in the Fiji islands.!. And as to the use of the stone circum-
cising knife, it is stated by Leutholf, who is looked upon as a
good authority, that it was in use in Atthiopia in his time,—
“The Alnajah, an Aithiopian race, perform circumcision with
stone knives.” ‘ Alnajah gens Adthiopum cultris lapideis cir-
cumcisionem peragit.”? This would be in the sixteenth cen-
tury. And though the modern Jews generally use a steel
knife, there appears to be a remarkable exception to this cus-
tom; that when a male child dies before the eighth day, it is
nevertheless circumcised before burial, but this is done, not
with the ordinary instrument, but with a fragment of flint or
glass.?
Under the reservation just stated, a recognition among the
Jewish ordinances of the practice of slaughtering a beast with
a [sharp] stone, may here be cited from the Mishna :—
eeawo inom mapa, 722, 1 Sasa. emwn
«Tf a person has slaughtered [a beast] with a hand-sickle, a
[sharp] stone, or a reed; it is casher,” i.e. clean, or fit to be
eaten. Here not only the context, but the necessity of shed-
ding the animal’s blood, proves that a proper cutting instrument
of stone, or at least a sharp-edged piece, is meant.
Before drawing any inference from these pieces of evidence,
it will be well to bring together other accounts of the use of
cutting instruments of stone, glass, etc., by people who, though
in possession of iron knives, for some reason or other did not
choose to apply them to certain purposes. Thus the practice
of sacrificing a beast, not with a knife or an axe, but with a
sharp stone, has been observed on the West Coast of Africa
during the last century, as will be more fully detailed in page
222.
1 Mariner, vol. i. p. 329; vol. ii. p. 252; Vocab. s.vv. “camo,” “ tefe.”
Williams, ‘ Fiji? vol. i. p. 166.
2 Ludolfi ‘ Historia AXthiopica ;? Frankfort-on-Maine, 1581, iii. 1. 21.
3 My authority for this statement is Mr. Philip Abraham, Secretary of the
Reformed Synagogue in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square.
* Mishna, Treatise Cholin, ch. i. 2.
THE STONE AGE—PAST AND PRESENT. PAT)
An often quoted instance of the use of a stone knife for a
ceremonial purpose, where iron would have been much more
convenient, is the passage in Herodotus which relates that, in
Egypt, the mummy-embalmers made the imcision in the side of
the corpse with a sharp Aithiopic stone.! The account given
by Diodorus Siculus is fuller :—‘ And first, the body being laid
on the ground, he who is called the scribe marks on its left side
how far the incision is to be made. ‘Then the so-called slitter
(paraschistes), having an Aithiopic stone, and cutting the flesh
as far as the law allows, instantly runs off, the bystanders pur-
suing him and pelting him with stones, cursing him, and as it
were, turning the horror of the deed upon him,” for he who
hurts a citizen is held worthy of abhorrence. There are two
kinds of stone knives found in excavations and tombs in Heypt,
both of chipped flint, and very neatly made; one kind is like
a very small cleaver, the other has more of the character of a
lancet, and would seem the more suitable of the two for the
embalmer’s purpose.
A story related by Pliny, of the way in which the balsam of
Judea, or “balm of Gilead,” was extracted, comes under the
same category. The incisions, he says, had to be made in the
tree with knives of glass, stone, or bone, for it hurts it to
wound its vital parts with iron, and it dies forthwith.*
With regard to the reason of such practices as these, it has
been suggested that there was a practical advantage im the use
of the stone knife for circumcision, as less liable to cause in-
flammation than a knife of bronze or iron. From this point of
view Pliny’s statement has been quoted, that the mutilation of
the priests of Cybele was done with a sherd of Samian ware
(Samia testa), as thus avoiding danger. But as regards iron,
at least, the ordinary Jewish practice shows that there is not
much in this, while a dead body is not liable to inflammation,
and yet the ancient Egyptians used, and the modern Jews use,
the stone knife in operating upon it. I heard the reason
assigned, in the latter case, that it is undesirable to use on the
living subject an mstrument which has been applied to such a
' Herod., ii. 86. 2 Diod. Sic., i. 91. 3 Plin., xii. 54.
4 Plin., xxxy, 46. xi. 109.
Biae THE STONE AGE—PAST AND PRESENT.
purpose ; but if this were all, it would be far less troublesome
to have a second knife than to use so miserable a substitute ;
and the argument does not touch the Egyptian case of the
embalmers. I cannot but think that most, if not all, of the
series are to be explained as being, to use the word in no
harsh sense, but according to what seems its proper. ety-
mology, cases of superstition, of the “standing over” of old
habits into the midst of a new and changed state of things, of
the retention of ancient practices for ceremonial purposes, long
after they had been superseded for the commonplace uses of
ordinary life. Such a view takes in every instance which has
been mentioned, though the reason of iron not being adopted
by the modern Jews in one case as well as in another is not
clear. As to Pliny’s story of the balm of Gilead, I am told,
on competent authority, that the use of stone and such things
instead of iron for making incisions in the tree, if ever it
really existed, could be nothing but a superstition without any
foundation in reason. It may perhaps tell in favour of the story
being true, that it is only one of a number of cases mentioned
by Plny, of plants as: to which the similar notion prevailed,
that they would be spoiled by being touched with an iron in-
strument.! There seems, on the whole, to be a fair case for be-
heving that among the Israelites, as in Ethiopia and Egypt, a
a ceremonial use of stone instruments long survived the ge-
neral adoption of metal, and that such observances are to be
interpreted as relics of an earlier Stone Age; while incidentally
the same argument makes it probable that the rite of circum-
cision belonged to the Stone Age among the ancient Israelites,
as we know it does among the modern Australians.”
With regard to the foregoing accounts, there is a point which
requires further remark. Glass has been mentioned by the
side of stone, as a material for making sharp instruments of ;
and it may seem at first sight an unreasonable thing to make
the use of a production which belongs to so advanced a state
of civilization as glass, evidence of a Stone Age. But savages
have so unanimously settled it, that glass is a kind of stone
1 Plin., xix. 57, xxiii. 81, xxiv. 6, 62.
? G. F. Angas, ‘South Australia Illustrated ;’ London, 1847, pl. v.
peculiarly suitable for such purposes, that where a knife of
glass, or a weapon armed with it, is found, it may be confi-
dently set down as the immediate successor of a stone one.
The Fuegians and the Andaman Islanders are found to have
used in this manner the bits of broken glass that came in their
way; the New Zealanders have been observed to take a piece
of glass in place of the sharp stone with which they cut their
bodies in mourning for the dead; and the North American
Indians to fix one in a wooden handle, in place of the sharp
stone with which the native phleme used to be armed. The
Australians substituted such pieces, when they could get them,
for the angular pieces of stone with which their lances and
jagged knives were mounted. Mr. Christy has some interesting
specimens of these Australian instruments, which date them-
selves in a curious way as belonging to the time of contact
with Europeans. They were originally set with stone teeth ;
but where these have been knocked out, their places have been
filled by new ones of broken glass.
To complete the survey of the Stone Age and its traces in
the world, Africa has now to be more fully examined. This
great continent is now entirely in the Iron Age. The tribes
who do not smelt their own iron, as the Bushmen, get their sup-
plies from others; and in the immense central and western
tracts above the Hquator, there appears to be no record of
tribes living without it. In South Africa, however, the case
is different; and the accounts of the English voyages round
the Cape of Good Hope about the beginning of the seventeenth
century, collected in Purchas’s ‘ Pilgrimes,’ give quite a clear
history of the transition from the Stone to the Iron Age, which
was then taking place.
Then as now, the inhabitants of Madagascar had their iron
knives and spear-heads; and they would have silver in pay-
ment for their cattle, 1s. for a sheep, and 3s. 6d. for a cow.
But on the West African coast, north of the Cape, there were
pastoral tribes, probably Hottentots, who evidently did not
know then, as they do now, how to work the abundant iron
1 Fitz Roy, Voy. of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle; London, 1839, vol. ii.
p- 184. Mouat, p. 305. Yate, p. 243. Loskiel, p. 144.
ore of their country. At Saldanha Bay, in 1598, John Davis
could get fat-tailed sheep and bullocks for bits of old iron and
nails, and in 1604 a great bullock was still to be bought for a
piece of an old iron hoop. But only seven years later, Nicho-
las Dounton, “ Captaine of the Pepper-Corne,” begins to write
ruefully of the change in this delightful state of things. ‘‘ Sal-
dania having in former time been comfortable to all our nation
travelling this way, both outwards and homewards, yeelding
them abundance of flesh, as sheepe and beeves brought downe
by the saluage inhabitants, and sold for trifles, as a beife for a
piece of an iron hoope of foureteene inches long, and a sheepe
for a lesser piece ;” but now this is at an end, spoilt perhaps
by the Dutchmen, ‘‘ who use to spoyle all places where they
come (onely respecting their owne present occasions) by their
ouer much liberalitie,” etc. etc.!
Specimens of stone implements from South Africa have been
brought to Kurope. A donble-flat stone adze mounted in a
very peculiar way in a withe handle, brought from Little Fish
Bay, about 15° 8. Lat., has been described and figured,? and
Mr. Christy has an ordinary small spear- or large arrow-head
found among the Hottentots, and ticketed “poisoned,” and a
lance-head from Fish River. Lastly, a native Damara story
clearly preserves a recollection of the time, possibly several
generations ago, when stone axes were used to cut down trees.
The tale is a sort of “ House that Jack built,” in which a little
girl’s mother gives her a needle, and she goes and finds her
father sewing thongs with thorns, so she gives him the needle
and he breaks it and gives her an axe. ‘Going farther on
she met the lads who were in charge of the cattle. They were
busy taking out honey, and in order to get at it they were
obliged to cut down the trees with stones.’”? She addressed
them :—‘ Our sons, how is it that you use stones in order to
get at the honey? Why do you not say, Our first-born, give
us the axe ?” and so on.?
' Purchas, vol. i. pp. 118, 133, 275, 417.
° G. V. du Noyer, in ‘Archeological Journal, 1847. A drawing in Klemm,
C. W., part ii. p. 71, would seem to be from this, or one almost absolutely like it.
3 Bleek, ‘Reynard in Africa,’ p. 90.
Going back two thousand years or so, record is to be found
at least of a partial Stone Age condition in North-Hastern
Africa. It appears from Herodotus that the African Ethiopians
in the army of Xerxes not only headed their arrows with sharp
stone, but had spears armed with sharpened horns of antelopes,
while the Libyans had wooden javelins hardened at the point
by fire. Strabo mentions in Ethiopia a tribe who pointed
their reed arrows in this way, and another who used as weapons
the horns of antelopes.? It is interesting to observe that in
South Africa the spear headed in this way has survived up to
our own time ; Mr. Andersson saw the natives at Walfisch Bay
spearing the fish left at low water, with a gemsbock’s horn at-
tached to a slender stick.®
Traces of a Stone Age in Egypt, in the use of the stone
arrow-head, and of the stone knife for ceremonial purposes,
have been already spoken of. No account of the finding of
stone implements in North Africa seems to have been pub-
lished, but Mr. Christy, in a journey made in Algeria in 1863,
found them there, as elsewhere. He met with flint flake-
knives, arrow-heads, and polished celts, at Constantine ; flakes,
arrow-heads, and a beautifully chipped lance-head of quartz-
ite, at Dellys on the coast; and flakes and a large pick-
shaped instrument, from the desert south-east of Oran, on the
confines of Morocco. At Bou-Merzoug, on the plateau of the
Atlas, south of Constantine, he found, in a bare, deserted,
stony place among the mountains, a collection of tombs, 1000
or 1500 in number, made of the rude limestone slabs, set up
with one slab to form a roof, so as to make, not mere crom-
lechs, but closed chambers where the bodies were packed in.
Tradition says that a wicked people lived there, and for their
_ sins stones were rained upon them from heaven, so they built
these chambers to creep into. Near this remarkable necro-
polis, Mr. Christy found flint-flakes and arrow-heads.
1 Herod., vii. 69, 71. 2 Strabo, xvi. 4, 9, 11. 3 Andersson, p. 15.
4 A paper by Mr. Christy, embodying some account of his discoveries in the
reindeer caves of Central France, and mentioning his finding stone implements
in North Africa, and the distribution of such in different parts of the world, was
read before the Ethnological Society in June, 1864.
If we go westward as far as the Canary Islands, we find a
race, considered to be of African origin, living in the fourteenth
century under purely Stone Age conditions, making hatchets,
knives, lancets, and spear-heads of obsidian, and axes of green
jasper, and pointing their spears and digging-sticks with horns.!
It is possible that they might have once had the use of iron,
and have lost it on removing to the islands, where there is no
ore, but no evidence of this having been the case seems to
have been found.
In Western Africa, when the god Gimawong came down to
his temple at Labode on the Gold Coast once a year, with a
sound like a flight of wild geese in spring, his worshippers
sacrificed an ox to him, killing it not with a knife, but with
a sharp stone.” Klemm looks upon this as a sign of the high
antiquity of the ceremony, and, taking into consideration the
evidence as to the keeping up of the use of stone for ceremo-
nial purposes into the Iron Age, the inference seems a highly
probable one, although there is another side to this argument.
In order to bring this into view, and to adduce some other facts
bearing on evidence of the Stone Age, it will be necessary to
say here something more of the Myth of the Thunderbolt.
For ages it has been commonly thought that, with the flash
of hghtning, there falls, sometimes at least, a solid body which
is known as the thunder-bolt, thunder-stone, etc., as in the
dirge in ‘ Cymbeline,’—
“ Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone.”
The actual falling of meteoric stones may have had to do with
the growth of this theory, but whatever its origin, it is one of
the most widely spread beliefs in the world. The thing con-
sidered to be the thunderbolt is not always defined in accounts
given. It is described as a stone,® or it may be a bit of iron-
1 Barker-Webb & Berthelot, ‘ Histoire Naturelle des Iles Canaries ;’ Paris,
1842, ete., vol. i. part i. pp. 62, 107,138. Bory de St. Vincent, ‘Essai sur les
Isles Fortunées ;’ Paris, An XI. (1803-4), pp. 58, 75-6, 156.
* Romer, p. 54. Klemm, C. G., vol. iii. p. 378.
Bosman, ‘Beschryving yan de Guinese Goud-Kust,’ etc.; Utrecht, 1704,
p. 109,
ore, or perhaps iron,! or a belemnite, BeXeuvitns, so called from
BéNeuvor, a dart, apparently with the idea of its being a thun-
der-bolt ; for this spear-like fossil is still called in England a
“‘thunder-stone.” Dr. Falconer mentions the name of “ light-
ning-bones” or “ thunder-bones,” given to fossil bones brought
down as charms from the plateau of Chanthan in the Hima-
layas,” where, of course, frequent thunderstorms are seen to
account for their presence. But it is also believed that the
stone celts and hammers found buried in the ground are thun-
derbolts. The country folks of the west of England still hold
that the “‘ thunder-axes” they find, once fell from the sky. In
Brittany, the itinerant umbrella-mender of Carnac inquires on
his rounds for pierres de tonnerre, and takes them in payment
for repairs; and these are fair examples of what may be found
in other countries in Europe, and not in those inhabited by our
Aryan race alone, for .the Finns have the same belief.2 The
remarkable Chinese account of the thunder-stones has been
already quoted, and it has been noticed that stone celts are
held to be thunderbolts in Japan and the Eastern Archipelago.
Hven in a country where the use of stone axes by the Indians
is matter of modern history, and in some places actually sur-
vives to this day, the Brazilians use, for such a stone axe-
blade, their Portuguese word corisco,* that is, “lightning,”
“ thunderbolt” (Latin coruscare).
As the stone axes and hammers are but one of several
classes of objects thought to be thunderbolts, it is probable
that the Myth took them to itself at a time when their real use
and nature had been forgotten, and the reason of their being
found buried underground was of course unknown. This view
is supported by the fact of the existence of such instruments
being also accounted for by taking them up into mythology in
other ways. Thus in Japan the stone arrow-heads are rained
from heaven, or dropped by the flying spirits who shoot them,
while in Europe they are fairy weapons, albschosse, elf-bolts,
1 Speke, Journal of Disc. ; Edin. and London, 1863, p. 228.
Proc. R. Geog. Soc., Feb. 25, 1864, p. 41.
Klemm, C. W., part ii. p. 65; and see Castrén, ‘ Finnische Mythologie,’ p. 42,
Pr, Max. y. Wied, ‘ Reise nach Brasilien ;’ Frankfort, 1820-1, vol. i. p. 35.
shot by fairies or magicians, and in the North of Ireland the
' wizards still draw them out from the bodies of ‘‘ overlooked”
cattle. Dr. Daniel Wilson mentions an interesting post-
Christian myth, which prevailed in Scotland till the close of
the last century, that the stone hammers found buried in the
ground were Purgatory Hammers for the dead to knock with
at the gates.”
The inability of the world to understand the nature of the
stone implements found buried in the ground, is not more con-
spicuously shown in the myths of thunderbolts, elfin arrows,
and purgatory hammers, than in the sham science that has
been brought to bear upon them in Europe, as well as in China.
It is instructive to see Adrianus Tollius, in his 1649 edition of
‘ Boethius on Gems,’ struggling against the philosophers. He
gives drawings of some ordinary stone axes and hammers, and
tells how the naturalists say that they are generated in the sky
by a fulgureous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circum-
fixed humour, and are as it were baked hard by intense heat,
and the weapon becomes pointed by the damp mixed with it
flying from the dry part, and leaving the other end denser, but
the exhalations press it so hard that it breaks out through the
cloud, and makes thunder and hghtning. But, he says, if this
be really the way in which they are generated, it is odd that
they are not round, and that they have holes through them,
and those holes not equal through, but widest at the ends.
It is hardly to be believed, he thinks.? Speculation on the
natural origin of high-class stone weapons and tools has now
long since died out in Europe, but some faint echoes of the
Chinese emperor’s philosophy were heard among us but lately,
in the arguments on the natural formation of the flint imple-
ments in the Drift.
With regard, then, to the use of thunderbolts as furnishing
evidence of an early Stone Age, it may be laid down that such
a myth, when we can be sure that it refers to artificial stone
1 Wilde, Cat. R. I. A., p. 19.
2 Wilson, Archeology, etc., of Scotland ; Edinburgh, 1851, pp. 124, 134, ete,
- 3 Boethius, ‘Gemmarum & Lapidum Historia,’ recensuit etc. Adrianus Tollius ;
Leyden, 1649, p. 482.
implements, proves that such things were found by a people
who, being possessed of metal, had forgotten the nature and
use of these rude instruments of earlier times. Kang-hi’s re-
marks that some of the so-called “lightning-stones”’ were
like hatchets, knives, and mallets, and Pliny’s mention of some
of the cerauni@ or thunder-stones being like axes,’ are cases
in point. But the mere mention of the belief in thunderbolts
falling, as for example in Madagascar? and Arracan,’ only gives
a case for further inquiry on the suspicion that the thunder-
bolts in these regions may turn out to be stone implements, as
they have so often done elsewhere.
The thunderbolt is thought to have a magical power, and
there is especially one notion, in connexion with which it comes
into use. This is that it preserves the place where it is kept
from lightning, the idea being apparently here, as in the belief
about the “ wildfire” which will be presently mentioned, that
where the lightning has struck, it will not strike again, so that
the place where a thunderbolt is put is made safe by having
been already struck once, though harmlessly. In Germany, the
house in which it is kept is safe from the storm ; when a tempest
is approaching, it begins to sweat, and again it is said of it, that
“he who chastely beareth this, shall not be struck by light-
ning, nor the house or town where that stone is,”* while nearly
the same idea comes out in Pliny’s account of the brontia, which
is “like the heads of tortoises, and falling, as they think, with
thunder, puts out, if you will believe it, what has been struck
by lightning.”> These notions suggest an interpretation of the
curious account given by Sir James Emerson Tennent of the
wajira-chumbatan, placed on the top of Singhalese dagobas or
shrines, to protect them from lightning.’ As wajira is Sanskrit
vajra, the thunderbolt, the virtue of the device may have lain,
as in the preceding cases, in some object supposed to be the
thunderbolt, or at least to represent it, as a stone celt, a dia-
mond, or some other precious stone.
In the mythology of our race, the bolt of the Thunder-god
1 Plin. xxxvii. 51. 2 Hillis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. pp. 30, 398.
3 Coleman, Myth. of Hindoos, p. 327. 4 Grimm, D. M., pp. 164, 1170.
5 Plin., xxxvii. 55. Tennent, ‘Ceylon,’ vol. i. p. 508.
holds a prominent place. To him, be he Indra or Zeus the
Heaven-god, or the very thunder itself in person, Thunor or
Thor, the Aryans give as an attribute the bolt which he hurls
with lightning from the clouds. Now it is clear that this was
the meaning of the Roman Jupiter Lapis. The sacred flint
was kept in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and brought out to
be sworn by, and with it the pater patratus smote the victim
slain to consecrate the solemn treaties of the Roman people.
« «Tf by public counsel,’ he said, ‘or by wicked fraud, they
swerve first, in that day, O Jove, smite thou the Roman peo-
ple, as I here to-day shall smite this hog; and smite them so
much more, as thou art abler and stronger” And having said
this, he struck the hog with a flint stone.”!
To those who read this, it is evident that the flint of Jupiter
was held either to be a thunderbolt or to represent one, and
the practice cannot be taken as having of necessity come down
from an early Stone Age, seeing that it might quite as well
have sprung up among a race possessed of metals. The sacred
instrument is commonly spoken of indefinitely, as lapis silea,
saxum silex, but it may have been a flint implement found
buried in the ground, for already in the ancient song of the
‘ Arval Brethren,’ the thunderbolt is spoken of as a celt (cu-
neus) ‘‘quom tibei cunei decstumum tonarunt,”* and, as has
been shown, at least this development of the myth of the thun-
derbolt belongs to an age when the nature of the buried stone
implement has been forgotten. Yet if all we knew about the
matter was that victims were sacrificed with a flint on certain
occasions, and that the Fetiales carried these flints with them
into foreign countries where a treaty was to be solemnized, it
might be quite plausibly argued that we had here before us a
practice which had come down, unchanged, from the time when
the fathers of the Roman race used stone implements for the
ordinary purposes of life. This is the other side of the ar-
gument, which must not be kept out of sight in interpreting,
as a relic of the Stone Age, the West African ceremony of
1 Liv., i. 24; xxx. 43. Grimm, D. M., p. 1171.
? Kuhn, ‘ Herabkunft-des Feuers,’ p. 226.
slaughtering the beast on the yearly sacrifice to Gimawong,
not with a knife, but with a sharp stone.!
The examination of the evidence bearing on the Stone Age
thus brings into view two leading facts. In the first place,
within the limits of the Stone Age itself, an unmistakable
upward development in the course of ages is to be discerned,
in the traces of an early period when stone implements were
only used in their rude chipped state, and were never ground
or polished, followed by a later period when grinding came to
be applied to improve such stone instruments as required it.
And in the second place, a body of evidence from every great
district of the habitable globe uniformly tends to prove, that
where man is found using metal for his tools and weapons,
either his ancestors or the former occupants of the soil, if there
were any, once made shift with stone. It would be well to
have the evidence fuller from some parts of the world, as from
Southern Asia and Central Africa, but we need not expect
from thence anything but confirmation of what is already
known.
1 A passage in Klemm, C. G., vol. iv. p. 91, relating to a Circassian practice of
sacrificing with a “thunderbolt,” arises from a misunderstanding. See J. 8. Bell,
‘ Circassia,’ vol. ii. pp. 96, 108.
SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS.
Iv has long been an accepted doctrine that among the similar
customs found prevailing in distant countries, there are some
which are evidence of worth to the ethnologist. But in deal-
ing with these things he has to answer, time after time, a new
form of the hard question that stands in his way in so many
departments of his work. He must have derived from observa-
tion of many cases a general notion of what Man does and
does not do, before he can say of any particular custom which
he finds in two distant places, either that it is likely that a
similar state of things may have produced it more than once,
or that it is unlikely—that it is even so unlikely as to approach
the limit of impossibility, that such a thing should have grown
up independently in the two, or three, or twenty places where
he finds it. In the first case it is worth little or nothing to
him as evidence bearing on the early history of mankind, but
in the latter it goes with more or less force to prove that the °
people who possess it are allied by blood, or have been in con-
tact, or have been influenced indirectly one from the other or
both from a common source, or that some combination of these
things has happened ; in a word, that there has been historical
connexion between them.
_ I give some selected cases of the Argument from Similar
Customs, both where it seems sound and where it seems un-
sound, before proceeding to the main object of this chapter,
which is to select and bring into view, from the.enormous mass
of raw material that lies before the student, four groups of
world-wide customs which seem to have their roots deep in the
early history of mankind.
It is a remarkable thing to find in Africa the practice which
we associate exclusively with Siam and the neighbouring coun-
tries, of paying divine honours to the pale-coloured, or as it
is called, the “white” elephant. A native of Enarea (in Hast
Africa, south of Abyssinia) told Dr. Krapf that white ele-
phants, whose hide was like the skin of a leper, were found in
his country, but such an animal must not be killed, for it is
considered an Adbar or protector of man and has religious
honours paid to it, and any one who killed it would be put to
death.1 There may be a historical connexion between the ve-
neration of the white elephant in Asia and Africa, but the
habit of man to regard unusual animals, or plants, or stones,
with superstitious feelings of reverence or horror is so general,
that no prudent ethnologist would base an argument upon it,
and still less when he finds that in Africa the albino buffalo
shares the sanctity of the elephant.
On the other hand, a custom prevalent in two districts com-
paratively near these may be quoted as an example of sound
evidence of the kind in question. In his account of the Sulu
Islands, north-east of Borneo, Mr. Spenser St. John speaks of
a superstition in those countries, that if gold or pearls are put
in a packet by themselves they will decrease and disappear,
but if a few grains of rice are added, they will keep. Pearls
they believe will actually increase by this, and the natives al-
ways put grains of rice in the packets both of gold and precious
stones.? Now Dr. Livingstone mentions the same thing at the
gold diggings of Manica in East Africa, south of the Zambesi,
where the natives “ bring the dust in quills, and even put in a
few seeds of a certain plant as a charm to prevent their losing
any of it in’the way.”* The custom was probably transmitted
through the Mahometans, who form a known channel of con-
nexion between Africa and the Malay Islands, but its very ex-
istence alone would prove that there must have been a connect-
ing link somewhere.
1 Krapf, p. 67. _ ? St. John, vol. ii, p. 235. 3 Livingstone, p. 638,
Intercourse between Asia and America in early times is not
brought to our knowledge by the direct historical information
by which, for instance, distant parts of Asia and Africa are
brought into contact; still there is indirect evidence tending
to prove Asiatic influence far in the interior of North America,
and the following may, perhaps, be held in some degree to
confirm and supplement it. Johannes de Plano Carpini, de-
scribing in 1246 the manners and customs of the Tatars, says
that one of their superstitious traditions concerns “ sticking a
knife into the fire, or in any way touching the fire with a knife,
or even taking meat out of the kettle with a knife, or cutting
near the fire with an axe; for they believe that so the head of
the fire would be cut off.””! The prohibition was no doubt con-
nected with the Asiatic fire-worship, and it seems to have long
been known in Europe, for it stands among the Pythagorean
maxims, “ip payaipa wi ocKanrevew,” “not to stir the fire
with a sword,” or, as it is given elsewhere, ovdjpe, “with
an iron.’”? In the far north-east of Asia it may be found in
the remarkable catalogue of ceremonial sins of the Kamchadals,
among whom “it is a sin to take up a burning ember with the
knife-point, and light tobacco, but it must be taken hold of
with the bare hands.” How is it possible to separate from”
these the following statement, taken out of a list of supersti-
tions of the Sioux Indians of North America? ‘They must
not stick an awl or needle-into. . .a stick of wood on the
fire. No person must chop on it with an axe or knife, or
stick an awl into it.... Neither are they allowed to take a coal
from the fire with a knife, or any other sharp instrument.’’4
The first of the four groups of customs, selected as examples
of an argument taking a yet wider range, is based upon the
idea that disease is commonly caused by bits of wood, stone,
hair, or other foreign substances, having got inside the body of
the patient. Accordingly, the malady is to be cured by the
medicine-man extracting the hurtful things, usually by sucking
1 Vincentius Beluacensis, ‘Speculum Historiale,’ 1473, book xxxii. c. vii.
2 Diog. Laert. viii. 1,17. Plut. ‘De Educatione Puerorum,’ xvii.
3 G. W. Steller, ‘ Beschreibung von dem Lande Kamitschatka ;’ Frankfort, 1774,
p- 274. 4 Schooleraft, part iii. p. 230,
the affected part till they come out. Mr. Backhouse describes
the proceedings of a native doctress in South Africa, which will
serve as a typical case. A man was taken ill with a pain in his
side, and a Fingo witch was sent for. As she was quite naked,
except a rope round her waist, the missionary who lived in the
place declined to assist at the ceremony himself, but sent his
wife. The doctress sucked at the man’s side, and produced
some grains of Indian corn, which she said she had drawn from
inside him, and which had caused the disease. The missionary’s
wife looked in her mouth, and there was nothing there; but
when she sucked again and again, there came more grains of
corn. At last a piece of tobacco-leaf made its appearance with
the corn, and showed how the trick was done. The woman
swallowed the tobacco first to produce nausea, and then a
quantity of Indian corn, and by the help of the rope round her
waist, she was able so to control her stomach as only to pro-
duce a few grains at a time.!' In North and South America,
in Borneo, and in Australia, the same cure is part of the doc-
tor’s work, with the difference only that bones, bits of wood,
stones, lizards, fragments of knife-blades, balls of hair, and
other miscellaneous articles are produced, and that the tricks
by which he keeps up the pretence of sucking them out are
perhaps seldom so clever as the African one.” In Australia the
business is profitably worked by one sorcerer charming bits of
quartz into the victim’s body, so that another has to be sent for
to get them out.’ It has been already mentioned that in the
North of Ireland the wizards still extract elf-bolts, that is, stone
arrow-heads, from the bodies of bewitched cattle.* Southey,
who knew a great deal about savages, goes so far as to say of
this cure by sucking out extraneous objects, as practised by
the native sorcerers of Brazil, that ‘their mode of quackery
was that which is common to all savage conjurors ;”* at any
rate, its similarity in so many and distant regions is highly re-
1 Backhouse, ‘ Africa,’ p. 284.
2 Long’s Exp., vol. i. p. 261. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. pp. 169, 335. St. John,
vol. i. pp. 62, 201. Lang, ‘ Queensland,’ p. 342. Eyre, vol. ii. p. 360.
3 Grey, Journals, vol. ii. p. 337.
4 Wilde, Cat. R. I. A., p. 19. 5 Southey, ‘ Brazil,’ vol. i. p. 288.
markable. It is to be noticed that, in this special imposture,
we have not only the belief that a disease is caused by some
extraneous substance inside the body, but we have also this
belief turned to account in remote parts of the world by the
same knavish trick. It is hard even to see a reason for the be-
lef, and much harder to imagine the sucking-cure to have grown
independently out of it in several places.
In the civilized world, the prohibition from marrying kindred
has usually stopped short of forbidding the marriage of cousins
german. It is true that the Roman Hcclesiastical Law is, at
least in theory, very different from this. Hallam says, “ Gre-
gory I. pronounces matrimony to be unlawful as far as the
seventh degree, and even, if I understand his meaning, as
long as any relationship could be traced, which seems to have
been the maxim of -strict theologians, though not absolutely
enforced.”! But this disability may be reduced by the dis-
pensing power to the ordinary limits; and in practice the
Society of Friends go farther than the Canon Law, for they
really prohibit the marriage of first cousins. If, however, we
examine the law of marriage among certain of the middle and
lower races scattered far and wide over the world, a variety of
such prohibitions will be found, which overstep the practice,
and sometimes even approach the theory of the Roman Church.
The matter belongs properly to that interesting, but difficult
and almost unworked subject, the Comparative Jurisprudence
of the lower races, and no one not versed in Civil Law could do
it justice ; but it may be possible for me to give a rough idea of
its various modifications, as found among races widely separated
from one another in place, and, so far as we know, in history.
In India, it is unlawful for a Brahman to marry a wife whose
clan-name or gotra (literally, ‘“ cow-stall’’) is the same as his
own, a prohibition which bars marriage among relatives in the
male line indefinitely. This law appears in the Code of Manu
as applying to the three first castes, and connexions on the fe-
male side are also forbidden to marry within certain wide limits.
The Abbé Dubois, nevertheless, noticed among the Hindoos a
tendency to form marriages between families already connected
} Hallam, ‘ Middle Ages,’ ch. vii. part 1i. See Du Cange, s. v. “ generatio.”
> ges, P 8 8
by blood; but inasmuch as, according to his account, relatives
in the male line go on calling one another brother and sister,
and do not marry, as far as relationship can be traced, were it
to the tenth generation, and the same in the female line, the
very natural wish to draw closer the family tie can only be ac-
complished by crossing the male and female line, the brother’s
child marrying the sister’s, and so on.!
The Chinese people is divided into a number of clans, each
distinguished by a name, which is borne by all its members,
and corresponds to a surname, or better to a clan-name, among
ourselves, for the wife adopts her husband’s, and the sons and
daughters inherit it. The number of these clan-names is li-
mited; Davis thinks there are not much above a hundred, but
other writers talk of three hundred, and even of a thousand.
Now, the Chinese law is that a man may not marry a woman
of his own surname, so that relationship by the male side, how-
ever distant, is an absolute bar to marriage. This stringent
prohibition of marriage between descendants of the male
branch would seem to be very old, for the Chinese refer its
origin to the mythic times of the Emperor Fu-hi, whose reign
is placed before the Hea dynasty, which began, according to
Chinese annals, in 22078.c. Fu-hi, it is related, divided the
people into 100 clans, giving each a name, “ and did not allow
a man to marry a woman of the same name, whether a relative
or not, a law which is still actually in force.’ There appear to
be also prohibitions applying within a narrower range to rela-
tion on the female side, and to certain kinds of affinity. Du
Halde says, that ‘‘ persons who are of the same family, or who
bear the same name, however distant their degree of affinity
may be, cannot marry together. Thus, the laws do not allow
two brothers to marry two sisters, nor a widower to marry his
son to the daughter of a widow whom he marries.”’?
In Siam, the seventh degree of blood-affinity is the limit
within which marriage is prohibited, with the exception that
1 Dubois, vol. i. p. 10. Manu, iii. 5. See Coleman, p. 291.
* Davis, vol. i. p. 264. Purchas, vol. iii. pp. 367, 394. Goguet, vol. iii. p.328.
Du Halde, Descr. de la Chine; The Hague, 1736, vol. ii. p.145. De Mailla,
yol.i. p. 6.
the king may marry his sister, as among the Incas, the Lagide
dynasty, etc., and even his daughter. Among the Land
Dayaks of Borneo the marriage of first cousins is said to be
prohibited, and a fine of a jar (which represents a considerable
value) imposed on second cousins who marry.2 In Sumatra,
Marsden says that first cousins, the children of two brothers,
may not marry, while the sister’s son may marry the bro-
ther’s daughter, but not vice versa.’ In the same island, it
is stated, upon the authority of Sir Stamford Raflles, that the
Battas hold intermarriage in the same tribe to be a heinous
crime, and that they punish the delinquents after their ordi-
nary manner by cutting them up alive, and eating them grilled
or raw with salt and red pepper. It is stated distinctly that
their reason for considering such marriages as criminal is that
the man and woman had ancestors in common.‘
Among the Tatar race in Asia and Europe, similar restric-
tions are to be found. The Ostyaks hold it a sin for two per-
sons of the same family name to marry, so that a man must not
take a wife of his own tribe.6 The Tunguz do not marry se-
cond cousins; the Samoieds “ avoid all degrees of consanguinity
in marrying to such a degree, that a man never marries a girl
descended from the same family with himself, however distant
the affinity ;” and the Lapps have a similar custom. Even
among the Semitic race, who, generally speaking, rival the
Caribs in the practice of marrying “in and in,” something of
the kind is found; the tribe Rebua always marries into the
tribe Modjar, and vice versa.’
In Africa, the marriage of cousins is looked upon as illegal
in some tribes, and the practice of a man not marrying in his
own clan is found in various places. Munzinger, the Swiss
1 Bowring, vol. i. p. 185. 2 St. John, vol. i. p. 198. 3 Marsden, p. 228.
4 Letter of Raffles to Marsden, in Dr. W. Cooke Taylor, The Nat. Hist of So-
ciety, vol. i. pp. 122-6.
5 Bastian, vol. iii. p. 299.
6 Klemm, C. G., vol. iii. p. 68. Acc. of Samoiedia, in Pinkerton, vol. ii. p. 532.
Richardson, ‘ Polar Regions,’ p. 345.
7 Bastian, l.c.
8 Casalis, p. 191. Backhouse, ‘Africa,’ p. 182. Burton in Tr. Eth. Soc.,
1861, p. 321. Du Chaillu, p. 388.
traveller in Hast Africa, suggests Christian influence as having
operated in this direction. The Beni Amer, north of Abyssinia,
follow the rules of Islam, cousins often marrying; ‘‘ the Beit
Bidel and the Allabje, on the other hand, mindful of their
Christian origin, observe blood-relationship to seven degrees.”!
In Madagascar, Ellis says that “certain ranks are not per-
mitted under any circumstances to intermarry, and affinity to
the sixth generation also forbids intermarriage, yet the prin-
cipal restrictions against intermarriages respect descendants
on the female side. Collateral branches on the male side are
permitted in most cases to intermarry, on the observance of a
slight but prescribed ceremony, which is supposed to remove
the impediment or disqualification arising out of consanguinity.’
Among the natives of Australia, prohibitory marriage laws
have been found, but they are very far from bemg uniform, and
may sometimes have been misunderstood. Sir George Grey’s
account is that the Australians, so far as he is acquainted with
them, are divided into great clans, and use the clan-name as a
sort of surname beside the individual name. Children take the
family name of the mother, and a man cannot marry a woman
of his own name, so that here it would seem that only relation-
ship by the female side is taken into account. One effect of
the division of clans in this way, is that the children of the
same father by different wives, having different names, may be
obliged to take opposite sides in a quarrel.’ Mr. Hyre’s expe-
rience in South Australia does not, however, correspond with
Sir George Grey’s in the West and North-West.‘ Collins be-
heved the custom to be for a native to steal a wife from a tribe
at enmity with his own, and to drag her, stunned with blows,
home through the woods; her relations not avenging the
affront, but taking an opportunity of retahating in kind. It
appears from Nind’s account, that in some districts the po-
pulation is divided into two clans, and a man of one clan can
only marry a woman of another.® In Hast Australia, Lang de-
scribes a curious and complex system. Through a large ex-
-! Munzinger, p. 319. 2 Ellis, ‘ Madagascar,’ vol. i, p. 164.
3 Grey, ‘ Journals,’ vol. ii. pp. 225-30. 4 Eyre, vol. ii. p. 330.
® Collins, vol. i. p. 559. Klemm C.G., vol. i. pp. 288, 319.
-
tent of the interior, among tribes speaking different dialects,
there are four names for men, and four for women, Ippai and
Ippata, Kubbi and Kapota, Kumbo and Buta, Murri and Mata.
If we call these four sets A, B, C, D, then the rule is that a
man or woman of the tribe A must marry into B, and a mem-
ber of the tribe C into D, and vice versa, but the child whose
father is A, takes the name of D, and so on; A’sD; B’sC;
C’sB; D’sA; and the mother’s name answers equally well
to give the name of the child, if the mother is of the tribe B,
her child will belong to the tribe D, and so on.
This ingenious arrangement, it will be seen, has much the
same effect as the Hindoo regulations in preventing inter-
marriage in the male or female line, but allowing the male and
female line to cross; the children of two brothers or two sis-
ters cannot marry, but the brother’s child may marry the
sister’s. Lang, however, mentions a further regulation, pro-
bably made to meet some incidental circumstances, as, so far
as it goes, it stultifies the whole system; A may also marry
into his or-her own tribe, and the children take the name of C.!
In America, the custom of marrying out of the clan is fre-
quent and well marked. More than twenty years ago, Sir
George Grey called attention to the division of the Australians
into families, each distinguished by the name of some animal
or vegetable, which served as their crest or kobong ; the prac-
tice of reckoning clanship from the mother ; and the prohibition
of marriage within the clan, as all bearmg a striking resem-
blance to similar usages found among the natives of North
America. The Indian tribes are usually divided into clans, each
distinguished by a totem (Algonquin, do-daim, that is “ town-
mark”), which is commonly some auimal, as a bear, wolf, deer,
etc., and may be compared on the one hand to a crest, and on
the other to a surname. The totem appears to be held as
proof of descent from a common ancestor, and therefore the
prohibition from marriage of two persons of the same totem
must act as a bar on the side the totem descends on, which
is generally, if not always, on the female side. Such a prohi-
bition is often mentioned by writers on the North American
1 Lang, p. 367.
Indians.'| Morgan’s account of the Iroquois’ rules is particu-
larly remarkable. The father and child can never be of the
same clan, descent going in all cases by the female line. Hach
nation had eight tribes, in two sets of four each.
1. Wolf, Bear, Beaver, Turtle.
2. Deer, Snipe, Heron, Hawk.
Originally a Wolf might not marry a Bear, Beaver, or Turtle,
reckoning himself their brother, but he might marry into the
second set, Deer, etc., whom he considered his cousins, and so
on with the rest. But in later times a man is allowed to marry
into any tribe but his own.? A recent account from North-
West America describes the custom among the Indians of
Nootka Sound ; ‘fa Whale, therefore, may not marry a Whale,
nor a Frog a Frog. A child, again, always takes the crest of
the mother, so that if the mother be a Wolf, all her children will
be Wolves. As arule, also, descent is traced from the mother,
not from the father.’
The analogy of the North American Indian custom is there-
fore with that of the Australians in making clanship on the
female side a bar to marriage, but if we go down further south
into Central America, the reverse custom, as in China, makes
its appearance. Diego de Landa says of the people of Yucatan,
that no one took a wife of his name, on the father’s side, for
this was a very vile thing among them; but they might marry
cousins german on the mother’s side. Further south, below
the Isthmus, both the clanship and the prohibition reappear on
the female side. Bernau says that among the Arrawaks of
British Guiana, “ Caste is derived from the mother, and chil-
dren are allowed to marry into their father’s family, but not
into that of their mother.”* Lastly, Father Martin Dobriz-
hoffer says that the Guaranis avoided, as highly criminal, mar-
riage with the most distant relatives, and, speaking of the
Abipones, he makes the following statement :—~ Though the
paternal indulgence of the Roman Pontiffs makes the first and
1 Grey, l.c. Schooleraft, part i. p.52; part ii. p. 49. Loskiel, p. 72. Talbot,
Disc. of Lederer, p. 4.
2 L. H. Morgan, p. 79. 3 Mayne, Brit. Columbia, p. 257.
4 Landa, p. 140. 5 Bernau, p. 29.
second degrees of relationship alone a bar to the marriage of
the Indians, yet the Abipones, instructed by nature and the
example of their ancestors, abhor the very thought of marrying
any one related to them by the most distant tie of relationship.
Long experience has convinced me, that the respect to con-
sanguinity, by which they are deterred from marrying into
their own families, is implanted by nature in the minds of most
of the people of Paraguay,” etc.!
It is likely that experience of the evils of marrying near re-
latives may be the main ground of this series of restrictions in
different parts of the world. Professor Lazarus, whose opinion
I asked about the matter, expressed this view, with the just
remarks that the observation and reasoning of savages are
often very accurate in practical matters requiring no instrument
for their observation, and that ‘old people with a personal ex-
perience ranging through five or six generations would have a
fair ground for judging on such a question. If this physiolo-
gical objection, often exaggerated beyond reasonable limits, be
the principal basis of the series of restrictions, their various,
anomalous, and inconsistent forms may be connected with in-
terfering causes, and this one in particular, that the especial
means of tracing kindred is by a system of surnames, clan-
names, totems, etc. But this system is necessarily one-sided,
and though it will keep up the record of descent either on the
male or female side perfectly and for ever, it cannot record
both at once. In practice, the races of the world who keep
such a record at all have had to elect which of the two lines,
male or female, they will keep up by the family name or sign,
while the other line, having no such easy means of record, is
more or less neglected, and soon falls out of sight. Under
these circumstances, it would be quite natural that the sign
should come to be considered rather than the reality, the name
rather than the relationship it records, and that a series of one-
sided restrictions should come into force, now bearing upon the
male side rather than the female, and now upon the female side
rather than the male, roughly matching the one-sided way in
1 Dobrizhoffer, vol. i. p. 63; vol. ii. p. 212. See Gumilla, Hist. Nat., etc., de
VOrenoque ; Avignon, 1758, vol. iii. p. 269.
which the record of kindred is kept up. In any full discus-
sion, other points would have to be considered, such as the
wish to bind different tribes together in friendship by inter-
marriage, and the opinion that a wife is a slave to be stolen
from the stranger, not taken from a man’s own people. There
is a good deal in this last consideration, as we may see by the
practice of the Spartan marriage, in which, though the bride’s
guardians had really sanctioned the union, the pretence of
carrying her off by force was kept up as a time-honoured cere-
mony. The Spartan marriage is no isolated custom, it is to be
found among the Circassians,'! and in South America.? Wil-
hams says that on the large islands of the Fiji group, the
custom is often found of seizing upon a woman by apparent or
actual force, in order to make her a wife. If she does not ath
prove the proceeding, she runs off when she reaches the man’s
house, but if she is satisfied, she stays. In these cases the
abduction is a mere pretence, but it is kept up seemingly as a
relic of a ruder time when, as among the modern Australians,
it was done by no means as a matter of form, but in grim
earnest.
Lastly, restrictions from marriage are occasionally found
applied to cases where the relationship is more or less imagi-
nary, as in ancient Rome, where adoption had in some measure
the effect of consanguinity in barring marriage ; or among the
Moslems, where relation to a foster- family operates more fully
in the same way ; or in the Roman Church, where sponsorship
creates a restriction from marriage, even among the co-spon-
sors, which it requires a dispensation to remove. Again, two
members of a Circassian brotherhood, though no relationship
is to be traced between them, may not marry,‘and even among
the savage Tupinambas of Brazil, two men who adopted one
another as brothers were prohibited from marrying each other’s:
sisters and daughters.» But such practices as these may rea-
sonably be set down as mere consequences of the transfer
both of the rights and the obligations of consanguinity to
? Klemm, C. G., vol. iv. p. 26. 2 Wallace, p. 497. See Perty, p. 270,
3 Williams, vol. i. p. 174. 4 Klemm, C., G., vol. iv. p, 24.
® Southey, vol. i. p. 250,
other kinds of connexion, and so do not touch the general
question.
To consider now the third group of customs, it is natural
enough that there should be found even among savage tribes
rules concerning respect, authority, precedence, and so forth,
between fathers- and mothers-in-law and their sons- and
daughters-in-law. But with these there are found, in the most
distant regions of the world, regulations which to a great ex-
tent coincide, but which le so far out of the ordinary course of
social life as understood by the civilized world, that it is hard
even to guess what state of things can have brought them into
existence.
Among the Arawaks of South America, it was not lawful for
the son-in-law to see the face of his mother-in-law. If they
lived in the same house, a partition must be set up between
them. If they went in the same boat, she had to get in first,
so as to keep her back turned towards him. Among the Ca-
ribs, Rochefort says, ‘ all the women talk with whom they will,
but the husband dares not converse with his wife’s relatives,
except on extraordinary occasions.”! Further north, in the
account of the Floridan expedition of Alvar Nufez, commonly
known as Cabecga de Vaca, or Cow’s Head, it is mentioned that
the parents-in-law did not enter the son-in-law’s house, nor he
theirs, nor his brothers’-in-law, and if they met by chance,
they went a bowshot out of their way, with their heads down
and eyes fixed on the ground, for they held it a bad thing to
see or speak to one another ; but the women were free to com-
municate and converse with their parents-in-law and relatives.”
Higher up on the North American continent, customs of this
kind have often been described. In the account of Major
Long’s Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, it is observed that
among the Omahas the father- and mother-in-law do not speak
to their son-in-law, nor mention his name, nor look in his face,
and vice versa. Among the Sioux or Dacotas, Mr. Philander
1 Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 77. Rochefort, Hist. Nat., etc., des Iles Antilles ;
Rotterdam, 1665, p. 545. j
Alvar Nuiiez, in yol.i. of ‘ Historiadores Primitivos de Indias ;? Madrid, 1852,
ete., chap. xxv. 3 Long’s Exp., vol. i. p. 253.
Prescott remarks on the fear of uttering certain names. The
father- or mother-in-law must not call their son-in-law by
name, and vice versd, and there are other relationships to
which the prohibition applies. He has known an infringement
of it punished by cutting the offender’s clothes off his back
and throwing them away. Harmon says that among the In-
dians east of the Rocky Mountains, it is indecent for the father-
or mother-in-law to look at, or speak to, the son- or daughter-
in-law.? Among the Crees, it is observed by Richardson that
while an Indian lives with his wife’s family his mother-in-law
must not speak to or look at him, and it is also an old custom
for a man not to eat or to sit down in the presence of his
father-in-law.
In some parts of Australia, the names of a father- or mother-
in-law and of a son-in-law are set down among the personal
names which must not be spoken,‘ and in the Fiji Islands pro-
hibition of speech between parents-in-law and children-in-law
has been recorded.* Among the Dayaks of Borneo, a man
must not pronounce the name of his father-in-law, which cus-
tom Mr. St.John, who mentions it, interprets as a sign of re-
spect. On the continent of Asia, among the Mongols and
Calmucks, the young wife may not speak to her father-in-law
nor sit in his presence,’ but farther north, among the Yakuts,
Adolph Erman noticed a much more peculiar custom. As in
other northern regions, the custom of wearing but little cloth-
ing in the hot, stiflmg interior of the huts is common there,
and the women often go about their domestic work stripped to
the waist, nor do they object to do so in the presence of stran-
gers, but there are two persons before whom a Yakut woman
must not appear in this guise, her father-in-law, and her hus-
band’s elder brother. In Africa, among the Beni Amer, the
wife “ hides herself, as does the husband also, from the mother-
in-law ;” while among the Barea the wife “ hides -herself from
1 Schoolcraft, part ii. p. 196. 2 Harmon, p. 341.
* Franklin, ‘ Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea ;? London, 1823, pp. 70-1.
4 Hyre, vol. ii. p. 339. 5 Williams, vol. i. p. 136.
§ St. John, vol. i. p. 51. 7 Klemm, OC. G., vol. iii. p. 169.
8 Erman, E. Tr. vol. ii. p. 420.
her father-in-law, according to custom, which herein agrees
with that of the aristocratic peoples.”! The Basuto custom
forbids a wife to look in the face of her father-in-law till the
birth of her first child,* and among the Banyai a man must sit
with his knees bent in presence of his mother-in-law, and must
not put out his feet towards her.3
Of this curious series of customs, I have met with no inter-
pretation which can be put forward with confidence. Their
object seems to be in general the avoidance of intercourse or
connexion between parents-in-law and children-in-law, some-
times to such an extent that one person may not look at the
other, or even pronounce his or her name. But the reasons
for this avoidance are not clear.4 It is possible that a fuller
study of the law of tabu may throw some light on the matter.
The extraordinary summary of Fijian customs given by the
Rev. Thomas Williams, may be here quoted in full; it is pro-
bably to be understood as taking in occasional or local prac-
tices. ‘“‘ A free flow of the affections between:members of the
same family is further prevented by the strict observance of
national or religious customs, imposing a most unnatural re-
straint. Brothers and sisters, first cousins, fathers- and sons-
in-law, mothers- and daughters-in-law, and brothers- and sis-
ters-in-law, are thus severally forbidden to speak to each
other, or to eat from the same dish. The latter embargo ex-
tends to husbands and wives,—an arrangement not likely to
foster domestic joy.” Elsewhere the same author says, “in
some parts, the father may not speak to his son after his fif-
teenth year.’”* i
The fourth and last group of customs has long been under
notice, and lists have even been made of countries where prac-
tices belonging to it have been found.’ One of these prac-
1 Munzinger, pp. 325, 526. 2 Casalis, p. 201. 3 Livingstone, p. 622.
* See St. John, Harmon, and Franklin, docis citatis. Prof. Lazarus pertinently
suggests exaggeration of ordinary restrictions, and excessive reaction against the
patria potestas.
5 Williams, ‘ Fiji,’ vol. i. pp. 136, 166. See Mariner, vol. ii. p. 147.
6 M‘Culloh, Researches ; Baltimore, 1829, p. 99. Waitz, Anthropology, vol. i.
p- 257. Humboldt & Bonpland, K. Tr., vol. vi. p. 333, Lazfitau, vol. i. p. 49.
tices has an existing Huropean name, the cowvade, or “ hatch-
ing,” and this term it may be convenient to use for the whole
set. By working up the old information with the aid of some
new facts, I have endeavoured to give an account, not only of
the geographical distribution of the couvade, but of its na-
ture and meaning. The most convenient way of discussing
it is first to examine the forms it takes in South America and
the West Indies, the district where it is not only developed to
the highest degree, but is also practised with a clear notion of
what it means ; and afterwards to trace its more scattered and
obscure appearances in other quarters of the world.
The following account is given by Du Tertre of the Carib
couvade in the West Indies. When a child is born, the mother
goes presently to her work, but the father begins to complain,
and takes to his hammock, and there he is visited as though
he were sick, and undergoes a course of dieting which would
cure of the gout “the most replete of Frenchmen. How they
can fast so much and not die of it,’ continues the narrator,
‘is amazing to me, for they sometimes pass the five first days
without eating or drinking anything; then up to the tenth
they drink oviycou, which has about as much nourishment in it
as beer. These ten days passed, they begin to eat cassava only,
drinking oviycou, and abstaining from everything else for the
space of a whole month. During this time, however, they
only eat the inside of the cassava, so that what is left is like
the rim of a hat when the block has been taken out, and all
these cassava rims they keep for the feast at the end of forty
days, hanging them up in the house with a cord. When the
forty days are up they invite their relations and best friends,
who being arrived, before they set to eating, hack the skin of
this poor wretch with agouti-teeth, and draw blood from all
parts of his body, in such sort that from being sick by pure
imagination they often make a real patient of him. This is,
however, so to speak, only the fish, for now comes the sauce
they prepare for him; they take sixty or eighty large grains
of pimento or Indian pepper, the strongest they can get, and
after well mashing it in water, they wash with this peppery
infusion the wounds and scars of the poor fellow, who I be-
lieve suffers no less than if he were burnt alive ; however, he
must not utter a single word if he will not pass for a coward
_ anda wretch. This ceremony finished, they bring him back
to his bed, where he remains some days more, and the rest go
and make good cheer in the house at his expense. Nor is this
all, for through the space of six whole months he eats neither
birds nor fish, firmly believing that this would injure the child’s
stomach, and that it would participate in the natural faults of
the animals on which its father had fed; for example, if the
father ate turtle, the child would be deaf and have no brains
like this animal, if he ate manati, the child would have little
_round eyes like this creature, and so on with the rest.””!
The Abate Guilij, after mentioning the wide prevalence of
the fasting of the father on the birth of the child, among the
tribes of the east side of South America, goes on as follows :—
“But I know not if the cause is equally well known, why the
Indians fast in such manner. I in the very beginning of my
stay among them had the opportunity of discovering it, and
this was how it happened. A fortified house having to be
built for the soldiers to live in, as was usual for the defence
not of the missionaries alone, but also of the reduced Indians,
the Tamanacs, they being still gentiles, were summoned by
the corporal Ermengildo Leale to work at it, and it was noticed
that a certain Maracajuri, when the work was done, went away
fasting, without even tasting a mouthful. ‘What, has he no
appetite?’ asked Leale in surprise. ‘To be sure he has,’ re-
joined the other Indians, ‘ but his wife has had a child to-day,
‘so he must not make use of these victuals, for the little boy
would die.’ ‘But when our wives are brought to bed,’ said
the corporal, ‘we eat more abundantly and more joyously than
usual, and our children do not die of it.’ ‘ But you are Span-
iards,’ the fools replied, ‘and if your eating does no harm to
your babies, you may be sure, nevertheless, that it is most
hurtful to ours.’ It may be easily imagined what laughter
1 Du Tertre, Hist. Gén. des Antilles habitées par les Francais ; Paris, 1667,
vol. ii. p. 371, etc. See Rochefort, Hist. Nat. et Mor. des Iles des Antilles ; -Rot-
terdam, 1665, 2nd ed. p. 550. It seems from his account that the very severe
fasting was only for the first child, that for the others being slight.
there was at this absurd notion. ‘ But not only the father’s
food,’ the Tamanacs went on to say, ‘ but even killing fish or
any other animal on such days, would do harm to the children.’ .
When I knew of this nonsense, I set myself to work to seek
out the motive of it, and taking aside one of the most reason-
able of the savages: ‘tell me, I said, ‘as the Spaniards do
not fast at the birth of their children, for what reason do you
fast at such a joyful moment?’ ‘The child is ours, and pro-
ceeds from us,’ replied the savage, ‘and the cooked food used
by grown folks, which is profitable for us at other times, would
now do the little children harm, if we ate it.’ So I observed
a sort of identity which he supposed to exist between father
and son,” etc. The missionary goes on to relate how he cured
the Indian of the delusion, by showing that to give him a
thrashing would have no effect on his child.
Among the Arawaks of Surinam, for some time after the
birth of his child, the father must fell no tree, fire no gun, hunt
no large game; he may stay near home, shoot little birds with
a bow and arrow, and angle for little fish ; but his time hang-
ing heavy on his hands, the most comfortable thing he can do
is to lounge in his hammock.’ Of the couvade among the
fierce equestrian tribe of the Abipones, whose home lay south
of the centre of the continent, the Jesuit missionary Dobriz-
hoffer gives a full account. ‘‘ No sooner do you hear that the
wife has borne a child, than you will see the Abipone husband
lying in bed, huddled up with mats and skins lest some ruder
breath of air should touch him, fasting, kept in private, and
for a number of days abstaining religiously from certain viands ;
you would swear it was he who had had the child. ... I had
read about this in old times, and laughed at it, never thinking
I could believe such madness, and I used to suspect that this
barbarian custom was related more in jest than in earnest; but
at last I saw it with my own eyes in use among the Abipones.
And in truth they observe this ancestral custom, troublesome
as it is, the more willingly and diligently from their being
altogether persuaded that the sobriety and quiet of the fathers
1 Gilij, ‘Saggio di Storia Americana,’ vol. ii. p. 133, ete.
? Quandt, in Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 83.
is effectual for the well-being of the new-born offspring, and is
even necessary. Hear, I pray, a confirmation of this matter.
Francisco Barreda, Deputy of the Royal Governor of Tucu-
man, came to visit the new colony of Conceicam in the terri-
tory of Santiago. To him, as he was walking with me in the
courtyard, the Cacique Malakin came up to pay his respects,
haying just left his bed, to which he had been confined in con-
sequence of his wife’s recent delivery. As I stood by, Bar-
reda offered the Cacique a pinch of Spanish snuff, but seeing
the savage refuse it contrary to custom, he thought he must be
out of his mind, for he knew him at other times to be greedy
of this nasal delicacy; so he asked me aside to inquire the
cause of his abstinence. I asked him in the Abiponian tongue
(for this Barreda was ignorant of, as the Cacique was of
Spanish), why he refused his snuff to-day? ‘Don’t you
know ?’ he answered, ‘ that my wife has just been confined?
Must not I therefore abstain from stimulating my nostrils?
_ What a danger my sneezing would bring upon my child!’
No more, but he went back to his hut to lie down again di-
rectly, lest the tender little infant should take some harm if he
stayed any longer with us in the open air. For they believe
that the father’s carelessness influences the new-born offspring,
from a natural bond and sympathy of both. Hence if the child
comes to a premature end, its death is attributed by the women
to the father’s intemperance, this or that cause being assigned ;
he did not abstain from mead; he had loaded his stomach with
water-hog; he had swum across the river when the air was
chilly ; he had neglected to shave off his long eyebrows; he
had devoured underground honey, stamping on the bees with
his feet ; he had ridden till he was tired and sweated. With
raving like this the crowd of women accuse the father with
impunity of causing the child’s death, and are accustomed to
pour curses on the unoffending husband.”}
We have laid open to us in these accounts a notably distinct
Dobrizhoffer, ‘ Historia de Abiponibus;’ Vienna, 1784, vol. ii. p. 231, ete.
For other South American accounts of the couvade, see Biet, Voy. de la France
Equinox., p. 389. Fermin, Descr. de Surinam ; Amsterdam, 1769, p. 81. Tschudi,
‘Peru,’ vol. ii. p. 235. Purchas, yol. iv. p. 1291. Spix & Martius, pp. 1186, 1339.
v2
view, among the lower races, of a mental state hard to trace
among those high in the scale of civilization. The Couvade im-
plicitly denies that physical separation of “individuals,” which
a civilized man would probably set down as a first principle,
common by nature to all mankind, till experience of the psy-
chology of the savage showed him that he was mistaking edu-
cation for intuition. It shows us a number of distinct and dis-
tant tribes deliberately holding the opinion that the connexion
between father and child is not only, as we think, a mere rela-
tion of parentage, affection, duty, but that their very bodies
are joined by a physical bond, so that what is done to the one
acts directly upon the other. The couvade is not the only re-
sult of the opinion which thus repudiates the physical severance
that seems to come so natural to us; and this opinion again
belongs, like Sorcery and Divination, to the mental state m
which man does not separate the subjective mental connexion
from the objective physical connexion, the connexion which is
inside his mind from the connexion which is outside it, in the
same way in which most educated men of the higher races
make this separation. A few more cases will further illus-
trate the effects of such a condition of mind. Not only is it
held that the actions of the father, and the food that he eats,
influence his child both before and after its birth, but that the
actions and food of survivors affect the spirits of the dead on
their journey to their home in the after hfe. Among the
Land Dayaks of Borneo, the husband, before the birth of his
child, may do no work with a sharp instrument except what is
necessary for the farm; nor may he fire guns, nor strike ani-
mals, nor do any violent work, lest bad influences should affect
the child; and after it is born the father is kept in seclusion
indoors for several days, and dieted on rice and salt, to pre-
vent not his own but the child’s stomach from swelling.! In
Kamchatka, the husband must not do such things as bend
sledge-staves across his knee before his child is born, for such
actions do harm to his wife.2_ In Greenland, beside the strict
1 St. John, vol. i. p. 160. Tr. Eth. Soc., 1863, p. 233. Compare the eight days’
fast in Madagascar of the fathers whose children were to be circumcised. Voy. of
Frangois Cauche, p. 51, in Rel. de Madagascar, etc.; Paris, 1651.
* Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 207. Steller, ‘ Kamtschatka,’ p. 351.
. OO23R+ ore
regulations imposed upon women after the birth of a child, the
husband must for some weeks do no work and follow no occu-
pation, except the procuring of necessary food, and this in
order that the child may not die. When a Greenlander dies,
his soul starts to travel into the land of Torngarsuk, where
reigns perpetual summer, all sunshine and no night, where
there is good water, and birds, fish, seals, and reindeer without
end, that are to be caught without trouble, or are found cook-
ing alive in a huge kettle. But the journey to this blessed
land is difficult, the souls have to slide five days or more down
a precipice all stained with the blood of those who have gone
down before. And it is especially grievous for the poor souls
when the journey must be made in winter or in tempest, for
then a soul may come to harm, and suffer the other death, as
they call it, when it perishes utterly, and nothing is left. And
this is to them the most wretched fate ; and therefore the survi-
vors, for these five days or more, must-abstain from certain food,
and all noisy work except their necessary fishing, that the soul
on its dangerous journey may not be disturbed or come to harm.!
But perhaps no story on record so clearly shows how deeply
the idea of these imaginary ties is rooted in the savage mind,
as one told by Mr. Wallace in his South American tour :—
*« An Indian, who was one of my hunters, caught a fine cock of
the rock, and gave it to his wife to feed; but the poor woman
was obliged to live herself on cassava-bread and fruits, and
abstain entirely from all animal food, pepper, and salt, which
it was believed would cause the bird to die.” The bird died
after all, and the woman was beaten by her husband for having
killed it by some violation of the rule of abstinence.’
But the explanation of the practices of the couvade, from
the confusion of imaginary and real relations, sound as it may
be so far it goes, is mcomplete. They almost all involve giving
over the parentage to the father, and leaving the mother out
of the question.*? This was an ancient Egyptian opinion, as
Southey points out when mentioning its most startling deve-
1 Cranz, pp. 275, 258.
2 Wallace, p, 502. For other connected practices, see Id. p. 501. Spix and
Martius, p. 381. 3 But see Spix and Martius, p. 1186.
lopment in the practice of the Tupinambas of Brazil, who would
give their own women as wives to their male captives, and
then, without scruple, eat the children when they grew up,
holding them simply to be of the flesh and blood of their ene-
mies. It is strange that writers who have spoken of the cou-
vade during the half-century since Southey wrote, and have
even quoted him, should have so neglected the contribution he
made to the psychology of the lower races in bringing forward
as the source of this remarkable practice at once the Egyptian
and American theory of parentage, and the belief in bodily
union between father and child.!
To trace now the geographical distribution of the couvade in
other parts of the world. The fasting observed in South Ame-
rica and the West Indies seems to extend no further; repose,
careful nursing, and nourishing food being the treatment usual
for the imaginary invalid. Venegas mentions this kind of
couvade among the Indians of California ;? Zucchelli, in West
Africa ;*> Captain Van der Hart, in Bouro, in the Eastern Archi-
pelago.* The country of Eastern Asia where Marco Polo
met with the practice of the couvade in the thirteenth century,
appears to be the Chinese province of West Yunnan,* so that
the widow’s remark to Sir Hudibras is true in a geographical
sense,—
“ For though Chineses go to bed,
And lie-in in their ladies’ stead.”
But it does not at all follow from this that the couvade was prac-
tised among the race ethnologically known to us as the Chinese.
The people among whom Marco Polo found it were probably
one of the distinct and less cultured races within the vast Chi-
nese frontier, for it has been noticed among the mountain tribes
known as the Miau-tsze, or ‘‘ Children of the soil,’ who differ
from the Chinese proper in body, language, and civilization,
and are supposed to be, like the Sontals and Gonds of India,
} Southey, vol. i. pp. 227, 248. Compare Spix and Martius, p. 1339.
2 Venegas, vol. i. p. 94. 3 Zucchelli, p. 165.
* C. v. der Hart, ‘Reize rondom het eiland Celebes ;* Sgravenhage, 1853, p. 137.
° Marco Polo, Latin ed., 1671, lib. ii. c. xli. Marsden’s Tr.; London, 1818,
p. 434.
remnants of a race driven into the mountains by the present
dwellers in the plains. A Chinese traveller among the Miau-
tsze, giving an account of their manners and customs, notices,
as though the idea were quite strange to him, that “In one
tribe it is the custom for the father of a new-born child, as
soon as its mother has become strong enough to leave her
couch, to get into bed himself, and there receive the congra-
tulations of his acquaintances, as he exhibits his offspring.’
Another Asiatic people recorded to have practised the cou-
vade are the Tibareni of Pontus, at the south of the Black
Sea, among whom, when the child was born, the father lay
groaning in bed with his head tied up, while the mother
tended him with food, and prepared his baths.? In Europe,
the couvade may be traced up from ancient into modern
times in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees. Above eighteen
hundred years ago, Strabo mentions the story that among
the Iberians of the North of Spain the women, “ after the
birth of a child, tend their husbands, putting them to bed
instead of going themselves ;”? and this account is confirmed
by the existence of the practice among the modern Basques.
“In Biscay,” says Michel, “ in vallies whose population recalls
in its usages the infancy of society, the women rise immediately
after child-birth, and attend to the duties of the household,
while the husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and
thus receives the neighbours’ compliments.”* It has been
found also in Navarre,® and on the French side of the Pyrenees.
Legrand d’Aussy mentions that in an old French fabliau the
King of Torelore is “ au lit et en couche” when Aucassin arrives
and takes a stick to him, and makes him promise to abolish
the custom in his realm. And the same author goes on to
1 W. Lockhart, in Tr. Eth. Soc. 1861, p. 181. , Rochefort (p. 550) sets down
the Japanese as practising the couvade; and the same bare mention appears in
later writers, who, perhaps, merely followed him. Is his statement based on
proper evidence, or simply a mistake ?
2 Apoll. Rhod. Argonautica, ii. 1009. C. Val. Flace. Argon., v. 148.
3 Strabo, iii. 4, 17.
4 Michel, ‘Le Pays Basque;’ Paris, 1857, p. 201. A. de Quatrefages, in Rev
des Deux Mondes, 1850, vol. v.
5 Laborde, ‘Itinéraire de Espagne ;’ Paris, 1834, vol. i. p. 273.
say that the practice is said still to exist in some cantons of
Béarn, where it is called faire la cowvade.! Lastly, Diodorus
Siculus notices the same habit of the wife being neglected, and
the husband put to bed and treated as the patient, among the
natives of Corsica about the beginning of the Christian era.”
The ethnological value of the four groups of customs now
described is not to be weighed with much nicety. The pro-
hibitions of marriage among distant kindred go for least in
proving connexion by blood or intercourse between the dis-
tant races who practise them, as it 1s easy to suppose them to
have grown up again and again from like grounds. But it is
hard to suppose that the curiously similar restrictions in the
intercourse between parents-in-law and their children-in-law
can be of independent growth in each of the remote districts
where they prevail, and still more difficult to suppose the
quaint trick of the cure by the pretended extraction of objects
from the patient’s body to have made its appearance indepen-
dently in Africa, in America, in Australia, in Europe. In such
cases as these there is considerable force in the’supposition of
there being often, if not always, a historical connexion be-
tween their origin in different regions. Thus, the isolated
occurrences of a custom among particular races surrounded ~
by other races who ignore it, may be sometimes to the eth-
nologist like those outlying patches of strata from which the
geologist infers that the formation they belong to once spread
over intervening districts, from which it has been removed by
denudation; or like the geographical distribution of plants,
from which the botanist argues that they have travelled from
a distant home. The way in which the couvade appears in the
New and Old Worlds is especially interesting from this point
of view. Among the savage tribes of South America it is, as
it were, at home in a mental atmosphere at least not so dif-
ferent from that in which it came into being as to make it a
mere meaningless, absurd superstition. If the culture of the
1! Legrand d’ Aussy, ‘ Fabliaux du xi1° et x111° Siécle, 3rd ed.; Paris, 1829, vol. iii.
“‘ Aucassin et Nicolette.” Rochefort, 1. c. [Faire la couvade, to sit cowring, or
skowking within doors; to lurke in the campe when Gallants are at the Battell;
(any way) to play least in sight (Cotgrayve).] 2 Diod. Sic., v. 14.
Caribs and Brazilians, even before they came under our know-
ledge, had advanced too far to allow the couvade to grow up
fresh among them, they at least practised it with some con-
sciousness of its meaning; it had not fallen out of unison with
their mental state. Here, then, we find covering a vast com-
pact area of country, the mental stratum, so to speak, to which
the couvade most nearly belongs. But if we look at its ap-
pearances across from China to Corsica, the state of things is
widely different ; no theory of its origin can be drawn from the
Asiatic and European accounts to compete for a moment with.
that which flows naturally from the observations of the mis-
sionaries, who found it not a mere dead custom, but a live
growth of savage psychology. The peoples, too, who have
kept it up in Asia and Europe seem to have been not the great
progressive, spreading, conquering, civilizing nations of the
Aryan, Semitic, and Chinese stocks. It cannot be ascribed
even to the Tatars, for the Lapps, Finns, and Hungarians
appear to know nothing of it. It would seem rather to have
belonged to that ruder population, or series of populations,
whose fate it has been to be driven by the great races out of
’ their fruitful lands, to take refuge in mountains and deserts.
The retainers of the couvade in Asia are the Miau-tsze of China,
and the savage Tibareni of Pontus. In Europe, they are the
Basque race of the Pyrenees, whose peculiar manners, appear-
ance, and language, coupled with their geographical position,
favour the view that they are the remains of a people driven
westward and westward by the pressure of more powerful
tribes, till they came to these last mountains with nothing but
the Atlantic beyond. Of what stock were the original barba-
rian inhabitants of Corsica, we do not know; but their posi-
tion, and the fact that they, too, had the couvade, would sug-
gest their having been a branch of the same family, who es-
caped their persecutors by putting out to sea, and settling in
their mountainous island.
Chapter 11
HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION.
Tue traditions current among mankind are partly historical
and partly mythical. To the ethnologist they are of value in
two very different ways, sometimes as preserving the memory
of past events, sometimes as showing by their occurrence in
different districts of the world that between the inhabitants of
these districts there has been in some way a historical con-
nexion. His great difficulty in dealing with them is to sepa-
rate the fact and the fiction, which are both so valuable in their
different ways; and this difficulty is aggravated by the circum-
stance that these two elements are often mixed up in a most
complex manner, myths presenting themselves in the dress
of historical narrative, and historical facts growing into the
wildest myths.
Between the traditions of real events, which are History,
and the pure myths, whose origin and development are being
brought more and more clearly into view in our own times
by the labours of Adalbert Kuhn and Max Muller, and their
school, there lie a mass of stories which may be called “‘ Myths
of Observation.” They are inferences from observed facts,
which take the form of positive assertions, and they differ
principally from the inductions of modern science in being
much more generally crude and erroneous, and in taking to
themselves names of persons, and more or less of purely sub-
jective detail, which enables them to assume the appearance
of real history. When a savage builds upon the discovery of
great bones buried in the earth a story of a combat of the
giants and monsters whose remains they are, he constructs a
Myth of Observation which may shape itself into the form of
a historical tradition, and be all the more puzzling for the por-
tion of scientific truth which it really contains. The object of
the present chapter is to collect a quantity of evidence, bearing
on the problem how to separate Historical Traditions and Myths
of Observation from pure Myths, and from one another.
Though it may not be possible to lay down any general
canon of criticism by which the historical and mythical ele-
ments of tradition may be separated, it is to some extent pos-
sible to judge by internal evidence whether or not a particular
legend or episode has a claim to be considered as history. It
happens sometimes that a legend contains statements which
are hardly likely to have come into the minds of the original
narrators of the story, except by actual experience. The Chi-
nese legend which tells us the name of the ancient sage who
taught his people to make fire by the friction of wood cannot
be taken as it stands for real history, seeing that so many na-
tions ascribe this and other arts to mythic heroes, yet it em-
bodies a recollection of a time when this was the ordinary way
of producing fire. So, when the same people tell us that they
once used knotted cords like the Peruvian quipus, as records
of events, and that the art of writing superseded this ruder ex-
pedient, we are in no way called upon to receive the names and
dates of the inventors to whom they ascribe these arts; but, at
the same time, it is hard to imagine what could have put such
an idea into their heads, unless there had been a foundation of
fact for the story, in the actual use of quipus in the country
before writing became general.
In the traditions which the Polynesians have preserved of
their migrations in past times, it is likely that some historic
truth may be preserved, and with their help, aided by a closer
study of the languages and myths of the district, it may be
some day possible for ethnologists to sketch out, at least
roughly, the history of the race for ages before the European
discovery. Much of the historical value of the South Sea tra-
ditions is due to their being commonly preserved in verses
kept alive by frequent repetition, and in which even small
events are placed on record with an accuracy and permanence
that yields only to written history. Thus a question that arose
when Ellis was in Tahiti, about a certain buoy that was stolen
from the ‘ Bounty’ nearly thirty years before, was settled at
once by a couple of lines from a native song.
““O mea eid e Tareu eid
Hia te poito a Bligh.”
** Such a one a thief, and Tareu a thief,
Stole the buoy of Bligh.”
Among the mass of Central American traditions which have
become known through the labours of the Abbé Brasseur,
there occur certain passages in the story of an early migration
of the Quiché race, which have much the appearance of vague
and broken stories derived in some way from high northern
latitudes. The Quiché manuscript describes the ancestors. of
the race as travelling away from the rising of the sun, and
goes on thus :—“ But it is not clear how they crossed the sea,
they passed as though there had been no se&, for they passed
over scattered rocks, and these rocks were rolled on the sands.
This is why they called the place ‘ranged stones and torn-up
sands,’ the name which they gave it on their passage within
the sea, the water being divided when they passed.” Then
the people collected on a mountain called Chi Pixab, and there
they fasted in darkness and night. Afterwards it is related
that they removed, and waited for the dawn which was ap-
proaching, and the manuscript says :—‘‘ Now, behold, our
ancients and our fathers were made lords and had their dawn ;
behold, we will relate also the rising of the dawn and the ap-
parition of the sun, the moon, and the stars.” Great was their
joy when they saw the morning star, which came out first with
its resplendent face before the sun. At last the sun itself
began to come forth ; the animals, small and great, were in joy ;
they rose from the watercourses and ravines, and stood on the
mountain tops with their heads towards where the sun was
1 Ellis, Polyn. Res., vol. i. p. 287.
coming. An innumerable crowd of people were there, and
the dawn cast light on all these nations at once. ‘‘ At last the
face of the ground was dried by the sun: like a man the sun
showed himself, and his presence warmed and dried the sur-
face of the ground. Before the sun appeared, muddy and wet
was the surface of the ground, and it was before the sun ap-
peared, and then only the sun rose like a man. But his heat
had no strength, and he did but show himself when he rose,
he only remained lke (an image in) a mirror, and it is not in-
deed the same sun that appears now, they say in the stories.’’!
Obscure as much of this is, there are things in it which
agree very curiously with the phenomena of the Arctic regions.
The cold and darkness, the sea not like a sea but like rocks
rolled on the sand, the long waiting for the sun, and its ap-
pearance at last with little strength, and but just rising above
the horizon, form a picture which corresponds with the nature
of the high north, as much as it differs from that of the tropical
regions where the tradition is found. We read of Arctic voy-
agers going out to watch for the reappearance of the sun to-
wards the close of the long dismal winter,” and the judgment
that it was not indeed the sun of Central America that appeared
so strangely, may be placed by the side of a remark made by
a savage in another country. Sir George Grey, travelling in
Australia, was once telling stories of distant countries to a
party of natives round the camp fire; “I now spoke to them
of still more northern latitudes ; and went so far as to describe
those countries in which the sun never sets at a certain period
of the year. Their astonishment now knew no bounds: ‘ Ah!
that must be another sun, not the same as the one we see
here, said an old man; and in spite of all my arguments to
the contrary, the others adopted this opinion.’’3
The legend of the introduction of rice in Borneo relates how
a Dayak climbed up a tree which grew downward from the
sky, and so got up to the Pleiades, and there he found a per-
sonage who took him to his house and gave him boiled rice to
eat. He had never seen rice before, and the story says that
1 Brasseur, ‘ Popol Vuh,’ pp. 231-48 ; ‘Mexique,’ vol. i. pp. 169-76.
2 Purchas, vol. iii. p. 499. 3 Grey, Journals, vol. i. p 293.
when he saw the grains, he thought they were maggots... Now
there is a tradition of recent date, among the Keethratlah In-
dians of British Columbia, which tells in the most graphic way
the story of the first appearance of the white men among them ;
how an Indian canoe was out catching halibut, when the noise
of a huge sea-monster was heard, plunging along through the
thick mist; the Indians drew up their lines and paddled to
shore, when the monster proved to be a boat full of strange-
looking men. “The strangers landed, and beckoned the In-
dians to come to them and bring them some fish. One of
them had over his shoulder what was supposed to be a stick :
presently he pointed it to a bird that was flying past—a violent
poo went forth—down came the bird to the ground. The In-
dians died! as they revived, they questioned each other as to
their state, whether any were dead, and what each had felt.
The whites then made signs for a fire to be lighted; the In-
dians proceeded at once, according to their usual tedious prac-
tice, of rubbing two sticks together. The strangers laughed,
and one of them, snatching up a handful of dry grass, struck a
spark into a little powder placed under it. Instantly another
poo!—and a blaze. The Indians died! After this the new-
comers wanted some fish boiled: the Indians, therefore, put
the fish and water into one of their square wooden buckets,
and set some stones on the fire; intending, when they were
hot, to cast them into the vessel, and thus boil the food. The
whites were not satisfied with this way: one of them fetched
a tin kettle out of the boat, put the fish and some water into
it, and then, strange to say, set it on the fire. The Indians
looked on with astonishment. However, the kettle did not
consume ; the water did not run into the fire. Then, again,
the Indians died! When the fish was eaten, the strangers
put a kettle of rice on the fire; the Indians looked at each
other, and whispered Akshahn, akshahn !, or ‘Maggots, mag-
gots !? 7?
Again, the Australians have had the same idea of what rice
was, for in the Moorunde dialect it is called “ yeelilee,” or
1 St. John, vol. i. p. 202, and see under, Chap. XII.
2 Mayne, ‘ British Columbia,’ p. 279.
“maggots,’! a name which, of course, dates from the recent
time when foreigners brought it to the country. When, there-
fore, we are told in the Borneo tale that the first Dayak who
saw grains of rice took them for maggots, we are, I think,
justified in believing this notion to be in Borneo, as elsewhere,
a real reminiscence of the introduction of rice into the country,
though this piece of actual history comes to us woven into the
texture of an ancient myth. There is reason to suppose that
rice was introduced into the Malay islands from Asia; in
Marsden’s time it had not been adopted even in Engano and
Batu, which are islands close to Sumatra.?
When a tradition is once firmly planted among the legendary
lore of a tribe, there seems scarcely any limit to the time
through which it may be kept up by continual repetition from
one generation to the next; unless such an event as the
coming of a stronger and more highly cultivated race entirely
upsets the old state of society, and destroys the old landmarks.
The traditions of the Polynesians, for instance, seem often to
be of great age, for they occur among the natives of distant
islands whose languages have had time to diverge widely from
a common origin; but even the most long-lived stories are
fast disappearing, under Huropean influence, from the memory
of the people. The historical value of a tradition does not of
necessity vary inversely with its age, and indeed this rule-of-
three test goes for very little, for some very old stories are,
beyond a doubt, of greater historical value than other very
new ones current in the same tribe.
There is even a certain amount of evidence which tends to
prove that the memory of the huge animals of the quaternary
period has been preserved up to modern times in popular tra-
dition. It is but quite lately that the fact of man having lived
on the earth at the same time with the mammoth has become
a generally received opinion, though its probability has been
seen by a few far-sighted thinkers for many years past, and it
had been suggested long before the late discoveries in the
Drift-beds, that several traditions, found in different parts of
1 Kyre, vol. ii. p. 393.
2 Marsden, pp. 467, 474. See Ellis, ‘Madagascar,’ vol. i. p. 39.
the world, were derived from actual memory of the remote
time when various great animals, generally thought to have
died out before the appearance of man upon the earth, were
still alive. The subject is hardly im a state to express a de-
cided opinion upon, but the evidence is worthy of the most
careful attention.
Father Charlevoix, whose ‘ History of New France’ was pub-
lished in 1744, records a North American legend of a great elk.
«There is current also among these barbarians a pleasant
enough tradition of a great Elk, beside whom others seem
like ants. He has, they say, legs so high that eight feet of
snow do not embarrass him: his skin is proof against all
sorts of weapons, and he has a sort of arm which comes out
of his shoulder, and which he uses as we do ours.”! It is
hard to imagine that anything but the actual sight of a live
elephant can have given rise to this tradition. The suggestion
that it might have been founded on the sight of a mammoth
frozen with his flesh and skin, as they are found in Siberia, is
not tenable, for the trunks and tails of these animals perish
first, and are not preserved like the more solid parts, so that
the Asiatic myths which have grown out of the finding of these
frozen beasts, know nothing of such appendages. Moreover,
no savage who had
never heard of the
use of an elephant’s
trunk would ima-
gine from a sight
of the dead animal,
even if its trunk
were perfect, that
its use was to be
compared with that
of a man’s arm.
The notion that
Fig. 30. the Indian story of
the Great Elk was a real reminiscence of a living proboscidian,
is strengthened by a remarkable drawing, Fig. 30, from one of
1 Charlevoix, vol. v. p. 187.
the Mexican picture-writings. It represents a masked priest
sacrificing a human victim, and Humboldt copies it in the
‘Vues des Cordilléres’ with the following remarks :—“ I should
not have had this hideous scene engraved, were it not that the
disguise of the sacrificing priest presents some remarkable and
apparently not accidental resemblances with the Hindoo Ganesa
[the elephant-headed god of wisdom]. The Mexicans used
masks imitating the shape of the heads of the serpent, the
crocodile, or the jaguar. One seems to recognize in the sacri-
ficer’s mask the trunk of an elephant or some pachyderm re-
sembling it in the shape of the head, but with an upper jaw
furnished with incisive teeth. The snout of the tapir no doubt
protrudes a little more than that of our pigs, but it isa long
way from the tapir’s snout to the trunk figured in the ‘ Codex
Borgianus.’ Had the peoples of Aztlan, derived from Asia,
some vague notions of the elephant, or, as seems to me much
less probable, did their traditions reach back to the time when
America was still inhabited by these gigantic animals, whose
petrified skeletons are found buried in the marly ground on
the very ridge of the Mexican Cordilleras ?”?! It may be worth
while to notice in connection with Humboldt’s remarks, that
when Mr. Bates showed a picture of an elephant to some South
American Indians, they settled it that the creature must be a
large kind of tapir.®
Attempts have been made by other writers to connect the
memory of animals now extinct, with mythological tales cur-
rent in the regions to which they belong. Dr. Falconer is dis-
posed to connect the huge elephant-fighting and world-bearing
tortoises of the Hindoo mythology with a recollection of the time
when his monstrous Himalayan tortoise, the Colossochelys Atlas,
the restoration of which forms so striking an object in the British
Museum, was still alive. The savage tribes of Brazil have
traditions about a being whom they call the Curupira. ‘‘Some-
times he is described as a kind of orang-otang, being covered
with long, shaggy hair, and living in trees. At others he is
' Humboldt, Vues des Cord., pl. xv. ; Borgia MS. in Kingsborough, vol. iii.
2 Bates, ‘ Amazons,’ vol. ii. p. 128.
3 Falconer, in Proc. Zool. Soc., part xii., 1844, p. 86.
said to have cloven feet, and a bright red face. He has a wife
and children, and sometimes comes down to the rogas to steal
the mandioca.”? Similar to, or the same as this being, is the
Caypér, whom the Indians, in their masquerades, represent as
a bulky, misshapen monster, with red skin and long shaggy
red hair, hanging halfway down his back.! With reference to
these Brazilian stories, Mr. Carter Blake remarks—“ In Brazil
the Indians had a tradition of a gigantic anthropoid ape, the
cayporé, which represented the African gorilla. No such ape
exists in the present day ; but in the post-pliocene in Brazil,
remains have been preserved of an extinct ape (Protopithecus
antiquus) four feet high, which might possibly have lived down
to the human period, and formed the subject of the tradition.”?
Lastly, Colonel Hamilton Smith has collected a quantity of evi-
dence, thought by him to bear on the preservation of the
memory of extinct creatures, adding to Father Charlevoix’s
great Elk, and the Pére aux Beeufs from Buffon, a North Ame-
rican ‘‘ Naked Bear,” and an East Indian “ Elephant-Horse,”
etc., and endeavouring to identify them in nature.®
To proceed now from the traditions which have, or may set
up some sort of claim to have, a historical foundation, to the
Myths of Observation, which are so often liable to be confounded
with them: it is to be noticed that if the mference from
facts, which forms the basis of such a myth, should happen to
be a correct one, and if the story should also happen to have
fairly dropped out of sight the evidence out of which it grew,
its separation from a real tradition of events may be hardly
possible. Fortunately for the Ethnologist, it is very common
for such stories to betray their unhistoric origin in one or both
of these ways, either by recording things which seemed indeed
probable when the myths arose, but which modern knowledge
repudiates, or by having embodied with them the facts which
have been appealed to for ages as confirmation of their truth,
but which we are now in a position to recognize at once as the
very basis on which their mythical structure was raised.
! Bates, ‘Amazons,’ vol. i. p. 73; vol. ii. p. 204.
2 C. Carter Blake in Tr. Eth. Soc. 1863, p. 169.
3 C. Hamilton Smith, Nat. Hist. of Human Sp., pp. 104-6.
A good example of a Myth of Observation is a story current
in Egypt in Strabo’s time, but which he, having indeed a con-
siderable knowledge of geology, declines to believe. “ But
one of the wondrous things,” he says, ‘‘ which we saw about
the pyramids, must not be passed over. There lie in front of
the pyramids certain heaps of the masons’ rubbish, and among
these there are found pieces in shape and size like lentils, and
m some, as it were, half-peeled grains. They say, the leavings
of the workmen’s food have been turned into stone, but this
is not likely, for at home among us there is a longish ridge of
hill in a plain, and this is full of lentil-like stones of tufa, ete.’?4
To men whose country has the open sea to its west it seems
that the sun plunges at night into its waters. Now the sun
is evidently a mass of matter at a distance, and very hot,
and when red-hot bodies come in contact with water there
follows a hissing noise; and thus the inference is easy and
straightforward, that when the sun dips into the waves such
a sound ought to be heard. From the inference that the
hissing might be heard, to the assertion that it has actually
been heard, is the easy step by which the crude argument of
early science passes into the full-erown Myth of Observation.
In two distant countries where the world seems to end west-
ward in the boundless ocean, the story is to be found. The
Sacred Promontory, that is Cape St. Vincent, Strabo says, is
the westernmost point, not of Hurope alone, but of the whole
habitable earth, and there Posidonius tells how the vulgar say
the sun goes down larger on the ocean-coast, and with a noise
almost as it were the sea hissing as the sun plunges into its
depths and is quenched ; but this is false, as well as that the
night follows instantly upon its setting.2 So in the Pacific,
in some of the Society Islands, the name for sunset means the
falling of the sun into the sea, and the sun itself is thought
to be a substance resembling fire. Mr. Ellis asked them how
they knew it fell into the sea, and they said they had not
seen it, but some people of Borabora or Maupiti, the most
western islands, had once heard the hissing occasioned by its
plunging into the ocean.$
1 Strabo, xvii. 1, 34. 7 Strabo, iii. 1,5. 3 Ellis, Polyn. Res., vol. ii. p. 414.
From the incredulous geographer who records the stories of
the fossil lentils and the hissing sun, yet another Myth of Ob-
servation may be taken, which shows well the easy transition
from “it may have been,” to “it was,” which hes at their root.
Mr. Catlin, in one of his journeys, says that he came to a place
where he saw rocks “looking as if they had actually dropped
from the clouds in such a confused mass, and all lay where
they had fallen.” So in old times, a round plain between Mar-
seilles and the mouths of the Rhone was called the “stony”
plain, from its being covered with stones as big as a man’s fist.
You would think, says Pomponius Mela, that the stones had
rained there, so many are they, and so far and wide do they
lie! Now Aischylus, says Strabo, having perceived the diffi-
culty of accounting for these stones, or having heard about it
from some one else, has wrested the whole matter into a myth.
In some lines of his, preserved to us by Strabo’s quotation of
them, Prometheus, explaining to Hercules his way from the
Caucasus to the Hesperides, tells him how when his missiles
fail him in his fight with the Ligurians, and the soft earth will
not even afford him a stone, Jove, pitying his defenceless state,
will rain down a shower of round pebbles over the ground,
hurling which he will easily rout his foes.?
Fossil remains have for ages been objects of curious specu-
lation to mankind. In the most distant regions where huge
bones have been found, they have been explained, truly enough,
as being the bones of monstrous beasts, and as plausibly,
though, as later investigations have shown within the last cen-
tury, not so correctly, as bones of giants. Given the belief that
the earth was formerly inhabited by monsters and giants, the
myth-making power of the human mind gave “a local habita-
tion and a name” wherever it was required, and the battles of
these monsters with each other, and with man, were worked
into the general mass of popular tradition, with gradually in-
creasing fulness and accuracy of detail. The Asiatic sagas
which have grown out of the finding of the frozen mammoths,
and the fossil remains of these and other great extinct ani-
mals, are excellent cases in pomt. Many of them have been
1 Catlin, vol. ii. p. 70. Mela, ii. c. 5. 2 Strabo, iv. 1, 7.
collected and criticized in an admirable paper published more
than twenty years ago by Von Olfers, of Berlin.
The Siberians are constantly finding bones and teeth of mam-
moths imbedded in the faces of cliffs or river banks at some
depth below the surface. Often a mass of earth or gravel falls
away from such a cliff, and exposes such remains. How could
they have got there? A plausible explanation suggested itself,
that the creature was a huge burrowing animal, and lived un-
derground. Not only the skeleton, but the body in tolerable
preservation with flesh and skin being found in a frozen state
in high Northern latitudes, the notion grew up that it was a
monstrous kind of burrowing rat, and it is described in Chinese
books under such namesas fen-shu, or “ digging rat,” yen-men,
or “ burrowing ox,” shu-mu, “ mother of mice,’ and soon. A
difficulty which suggested itself to the native Siberian geologists
was met in a characteristic manner. It was strange that when-
ever they came upon a mammoth imbedded in a cliff, it was
always dead. It must be a creature unable to bear the air or
the light, and when in the course of its subterranean wander-
ings it breaks through to the outer air, it dies immediately.
With so much knowledge of the natural history of the creature
to start from, other details grow round it in the usual way.
Yakuts and Tunguz have seen the earth heave and sink, as a
mammoth walked beneath. It frequents marshes, and travels
underground, never appearing above the surface of the earth
or water during the day, but has been seen at dawn in lakes
and rivers, just as it dived below. The account of it given in
the Chinese Encyclopzedia of Kang-hi is as follows :—
Fen-shu.—The cold is extreme and almost continual on the
coast of the Northern Sea, beyond the Tai-tong-Kiang ; on this
coast is found the animal F'en-shu, which resembles a rat in
shape, but is as big as an elephant; it dwells in dark ca-
verns, and ever shuns the light. There is got from it an ivory
as white as that of the elephant, but easier to work, and not
liable to split. Its flesh is very cold, and excellent for refresh-
1 J. F. M. vy. Olfers, ‘ Die Ueberreste yorweltlicher Riesenthiere in Beziehung
zu Ostasiatischen Sagen und Chinesischen Schriften’ (Berlin Acad., 1839) ; Ber-
lin, 1840.
ing the blood. The ancient book Shin-y-King, speaks of this
animal in the following terms:—There is in the extreme
north, among the snows and ice which cover this region, a shw
(rat), which weighs up to a thousand pounds, its flesh is very
good for those who are heated. The Tse-shu calls it fen-shu,
and speaks of another kind which is of less size; it is only,
says this authority, as large as a buffalo, it burrows like the
moles, shuns the light, and almost always stays in its under-
ground caves. It is said that it would die if it saw the light of
the sun, or even of the moon.”’!
The story of the mammoth being a burrowing animal, which
has arisen from the finding its remains exposed in cliffs or banks
deep below the surface, becomes the more valuable as evidence
of the growth of myths, from the fact that on the other side of
the world a like story has developed itself from a like origin.
When Darwin visited certain cliffs of the River Parana, between
Buenos Ayres and Santa Fé, where many bones of Mastodons
are found, he says, “The men who took me in the canoe, said
they had long known of these skeletons, and had often won-
dered how they had got there: the necessity of a theory being
felt, they came to the conclusion that, like the bizcacha, the
mastodon was formerly a burrowing animal.”? The bizcacha is
a small rabbit-like rodent, common on the Pampas.
Other fossil remains beside those of the mammoth have given
rise to myths of observation in Siberia. The curved tusks of
the Rhinoceros tichorhinus are something lke the claws of a
monstrous bird, and when both tusks are found united by part
of the skull, the whole might very well be taken by a man to-
tally ignorant of anatomy, for the bird’s foot with two claws.
The Siberians not only believe the horns of the rhinoceros to
be the claws of an enormous bird, and call them “ bird’s claws”
accordingly, but a family of myths has developed itself out of
this belief, how these winged monsters lived in the country in
the time of the ancestors of the present inhabitants, who fought
with them for the possession of the land. One story tells how
the country was wasted by one of them, till a wise man fixed a
1 Mém. cone. les Chinois, vol. iv. p. 481. Klemm, C. G., vol. vi. p. 471.
? Darwin, p. 127.
pomted iron spear on the top of a pine-tree, and the bird
alighted there, and skewered itself upon the lance.
Adolf Erman connects, with much plausibility, the well-
known rukh of the Arabian Nights, and the griffin (ypv) of
Herodotus, with the tales of monstrous birds current in the
gold-producing regions of Siberia; and he even suggests the
remark that gold-bearing sand really underlies the beds which
contain these fossil “bird’s claws” as an explanation of the
passage, “it is said that the Arimaspi, one-eyed men, seize
(the gold) from underneath the griffins (Aéyerau 8€ trex TOV
ypuTa@v apmavev Apywactovs avdpas povvodOddmovs).’ At
about the same time as Herodotus, Ctesias brings out more
fully the familiar figure of the griffin. ‘There is also gold,”
he says, “in the Indian country, not found in the streams and
washed, as in the river Pactolus; but there are many and great
mountains, wherein dwell the griffins, four-footed birds of the
greatness of the wolf, but with legs and claws like lions. The
feathers on the rest of their bodies are black, but red on the
breast. Through them it is that the gold in the mountains,
though plentiful, is most difficult to get.”? That the Siberian
myths of monstrous birds have passed into the medieval no-
tions of the griffins admits of no question whatever. Albertus
Magnus describes them as quadrupeds, with birds’ beaks ané
wines; they dwell in Scythia, and possess the gold, and silver,
and precious stones. ‘The Arimaspi fight with them. In its
nest the griffin lays the agate for its help and medicine. It is
hostile to men and horses; it has long claws, which are made
into goblets; they are as big as ox-horns, as indeed the crea-
ture itself is bigger than eight lions; of its feathers are made
strong bows, arrows, and lances.> With regard to this descrip-
tion, it is to be observed that the horns, cut in slices, are really
used for plating bows ;* but the bird’s quills, as they are still
considered to be in the country where they are found, are the
leg-bones of other animals.? The rhinoceros horns, supposed
1 Herod., iti. 116. Erman, Reise, vol. i. pp. 711-2.
2 Ctesias, ‘De Rebus Indicis,’ 12. ;
3 Klemm, C. G., vol. i. p. 155, and see p. 101.
4 Olfers, p. 12. > EKrman, vol. i. p. 711.
to be griffins’ claws, were mounted in gold and silver in Hu-
rope in the middle ages, and preserved as relics in churches.
There is or was one in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
mounted on little gilt claws, which sufficiently show what it
was thought to be.
The Chinese idea that the mammoth was a huge rat, and the
very name of “ Mother of Mice” given to it, fit curiously with
a set of North American stories, which may have a like origin
in the finding of fossil remains of enormous size. The name of
the “ Pére aux Boeufs,” probably the translation of a native
Indian name, was given to an extinct animal whose huge bones
were found on the banks of the Ohio.1 The Indians of New
France, Father Paul le Jeune relates in 1635, “say besides, that
all the animals of each species have an elder brother, who is as
the beginning and origin of all the race, and this elder brother
is marvellously great and powerful. ‘The elder brother of the
beavers, they told me, is perhaps as big as our hut.’’? There
are current among the Iroquois, says Morgan, fables of a buf-
falo of such huge dimensions as to thresh down the forest in
his march.’ And lastly, in one of the North American tales
of the Sun-Catcher, we find a creature to which the name of
“ Mother of Mice” may well belong. When the Sun was to be
set free from the snare, the animals debated who should go up
and sever the cord, and the dormouse went, “‘ for at this time
the dormouse was the largest animal in the world; when it
stood up it looked lke a mountain.” The whole story, which
goes on to tell how it has come to pass that the dormice are
but small creatures now, is given here in the next chapter.
The native tribes of the lower end of South America ex-
plained the reason why they, unlike the Spaniards, had no
herds of cattle in their country, by an interesting story, which
has the air of a myth of observation founded upon the exami-
nation of caves containing fossil bones. They had a multipli-
city of inferior deities below the two great powers of Good and
Evil, who, there as elsewhere on the American continent, are
' Buffon, Hist. Nat. (ed. Sonnini), vol. xxviii. p. 264.
2 Le Jeune, Relations (1634), vol. i. p. 46.
5 Morgan, p. 166.
»
above all. Hach of the lower deities presides over one parti-
cular caste or family of Indians, of which he is supposed to have
been the creator. “Some make themselves of the caste of the
tiger, some of the lion, some of the guanaco, and others of the
ostrich, etc. They imagine that these deities have each their
separate habitations, in vast caverns under the earth, beneath
some lake, hill, etc.; and that when an Indian dies, his soul
goes to live with the deity who presides over his particular
family, there to enjoy the happiness of being eternally drunk.
They believe that their good deities made the world, and that
they first created the Indians in their caves, gave them the
lance, the bow and arrows, and the stone-bowls, to fight and
hunt with, and then turned them out to shift for themselves.
They imagine that the deities of the Spaniards did the same
by them; but that, instead of lances, bows, etc., they gave
them guns and swords. They suppose that when the beasts,
birds, and lesser animals were created, those of the more nim-
ble kind came immediately out of their caves; but that the
bulls and cows being the last, the Indians were so frightened
at the sight of their horns, that they stopped up the entrance
of their caves with great stones. This is the reason they give
why they had no black cattle in their country till the Spaniards
brought them over, who more wisely had let them out of the
caves.” } :
The possibility that the Brazilian belief in the caypor or
wild ape-lke being of the woods may be derived from a re-
collection of a great extinct ape has been already mentioned,
but there is a circumstance which rather favours the idea of
its being a myth, founded on the examination of fossil bones.
Like the mammoth, and the mastodon, and the creators of the
beasts and birds, he is thought to live underground. ‘“ They
believe he has subterranean campos and hunting grounds in
the forest, well stocked with pacas and deer.”’? It is possible,
too, that the notion of subterranean animals, who die if they
see the daylight, hke the mammoths of Siberia, may be traced
in various stories. Thus, the Fijians tell a tale of two rocks,
. | Thos. Falkner, ‘A Description of Patagonia,’ ete.; Hereford, 1774, p. 114.
? Bates, vol. ii. p. 204.
male and female Lado, which are two deities who were turned
by the sight of daylight into stone ;! and in the West Indies
there were men who dwelt in Cimmerian darkness in their
caves, and coming out were turned into stones and trees by
the sight of the sun.?
Tales of giants and monsters, which stand in direct con-
nexion with the finding of great fossil bones, are scattered
broadcast over the mythology of the world. Huge bones,
found at Punto Santa Elena, in the north of Guayaquil, have
served as a foundation for the story of a colony of giants who
dwelt there.’ The whole area of the Pampas is a great sepul-
chre of enormous extinct animals; no wonder that one great
plain should be called the ‘‘ Field of the Giants,” and that such
names as “ the hill of the giant,’’ “‘ the stream of the animal,”
should be guides to the geologist in his search for fossil
bones.*
In North America it is the same. The fossil bones of
Mexico are referred to the giants who dwelt in the land mm
early times, and were found living in the plains of Tlascala by
the Olmecs, who came there before the Toltecs. At the time
of the conquest, Bernal Diaz was told of their huge stature
and their crimes; and, to show him how big they were, the
people brought him a bone of one of them, which he measured
himself against, and it was as tall as he, who was a man of rea-
sonable stature. He and his companions were astonished to
see those bones, and held it for certain that there had been
giants in that land.’ The Indians of North America tell how
their mythic hero, Manabozho, “ killed the ancient monsters
whose bones we now see under the earth.” They use pieces
of the bones of these monsters as charms, and most likely the
pieces of bone drawn in their pictures as instruments of magic
power are such. They tell of giants who could stride over the
1 Seemann, ‘ Viti,’ p. 66. 2 Oviedo, in Purchas, vol. v. p. 959.
3 Humboldt, Vues des Cord., pl. 26. Rivero and Tschudi, Ant. Per. p. 51.
4 Darwin, in Narr., vol. iii. p. 155.
° Bernal Diaz, Cong. de la Nueva Espafia; Madrid, 1795, vol. i. p. 350.
Tylor, ‘ Mexico,’ p. 236. Clavigero, vol. i. p. 125. Humboldt, Vues des Cord.,
pl. 26.
largest rivers, and the tallest pme-trees. The Winnebagos say
their monstrous medicine animal still exists, and they have
pieces of the bones which belong to them, which they use as
charms. The Dacotas use such bones for “ medicine,” and say
they belong to the great horned water-beast, the Unk-a-ta-he.
Hiawatha helped the Indians to subdue the great monsters that
overran the country. The “Tom Thumb” of the Chippewas
killed the giants, and hacked them into little pieces, saying,
“ Henceforth let no man be larger than you are now,” and so
men became of their present size.! There are plenty more
such stories. One mentioned by Dr. Wilson has the interest-
ing feature that monsters and giants both perished by the
thunderbolts of the Great Spirit, and in another all the mon-
sters were thus slain except the Big Bull, who went off to the
Great Lakes.? It must be borne in mind, however, that in spe-
culating on the origin of tales such as these, possible recollec-
tions of contests of men with huge animals now extinct must
be taken into consideration, as well as inferences from the
finding of large bones, and sometimes even both causes may
have worked together.
In the Old World, myths both old and new connected with
huge bones, fossil or recent, are common enough.® Marcus
Scaurus brought to Rome, from Joppa, the bones of the mon-
ster who was to have devoured Andromeda, while the vestiges
of the chains which bound her were to be seen there on the
rock ;* and the sepulchre of Antzeus, containing his skeleton,
60 cubits long, was found in Mauritania.°
Don Quixote was beforehand with Dr. Falconer in reasoning
on the huge fossil bones so common in Sicily as remains of
ancient inhabitants, as appears from his answer to the barber’s
question, how big he thought the giant Morgante might have
been? “... Moreover, in the island ofsSicily there have
been found long-bones and shoulder-bones so huge, that their
size manifests their owners to have been giants, and as big as
1 Schoolcraft, part i. pp. 319, 390; part ii. pp. 175, 224; part iii. pp. 232, 315,
319. 2 Wilson, ‘ Prehistoric Man,’ vol. i. p. 112.
3 In Polynesia, see Mariner, vol.i. p. 313.
4 Plin., ix. 4; v. 14. 5 Strabo, xvii. 3, 8.
great towers, for this truth geometry sets beyond doubt.”
Again, the fossil bones so plentifully strewed over the Sewalik,
or lowest ranges of the Himalayas, belonged to the slain Ra-
kis,! the gigantic Rakshasas of the Indian mythology. The
remains of the Dun Cow that Guy Harl of Warwick slew are
or were to be seen in England, in the shape of a whale’s rib
in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and some great fossil bone
kept, I believe, in Warwick Castle. ‘‘The giant sixteen feet
high, whose bones were found in 1577 near Reyden under an
uprooted oak, and examined and celebrated im song by Felix
Plater, the renowned physician of Basle, has been long ago
banished by later naturalists into a very distant department of
zoology ; but the giant has from that time forth got a firm
standing-ground beside the arms of Lucerne, and will keep it,
all critics to the contrary notwithstanding.’”?
It would be tedious to enumerate more instances in which
traditions of giants and huge beasts have been formed both in
ancient and modern times from the finding of great fossil
bones. But the remarks of St. Augustine on a great fossil
tooth he saw are worthy of attention, as throwing some light
on the connexion of such bones with the belief that man was
once both enormously larger and longer-lived than he is now,
and that his stature has diminished in the course of ages to its
present dimensions; as it is held by the Moslems that Adam
was sixty feet high, of the measure of a tall palm-tree, and
that the true believers will be restored in Paradise to this ori-
ginal stature of the human race, and that the houris who will
attend them will be of proportionate dimensions. It seems as
if Linnzus may have held such an opinion, at least his editor
gives the following as his reading of a passage im the notes of
his northern tour, where unfortunately the original is obscure.
“‘T have a notion that Adam and Eve were giants, and that
mankind from one generation to another, owing to poverty and
other causes, have diminished in size. Hence perhaps the di-
minutive stature of the Laplanders.’”?
St. Augustine’s observations are contained in his chapter
1 Torrens, ‘ Ladak,’ etc., p. 87. 2 Olfers, p. 3.
3 Linneus, ‘Tour,’ vol. i. p. 28.
“Concerning the long life of men before the flood, and the
greater size of their bodies.” He makes these remarks, he
Says, In case any infidel should raise a doubt about men having
lived to so great an age. ‘‘ Sosome indeed do not believe that
men’s bodies were formerly much greater than now.” Virgil,
he continues, expresses the huge size of the men of former
times, how much more then in the younger periods of the
world, before the celebrated deluge. ‘But concerning the
magnitude of their bodies, the graves laid bare by age or the
force of rivers and various accidents especially convict the in-
credulous, where they have come to light, or where bones of
the dead of incredible magnitude have fallen. I have seen,
and not I alone, on the shore by Utica, so huge a molar tooth
of a man, that were it cut up into small models of teeth like
ours, it would seem enough to make a hundred of them. But
this I should think had belonge +o some giant; for beside
that the bodies of all men were then much larger than ours,
the giants again far exceeded the rest.’””!
Among the traditions preserved from remote ages by the
human race, there are perhaps none more important to the
ethnologist than those which relate, in every great district of
the world, and with so much unity combined with so much
variety, the occurrence of a great Deluge in long past time.
In studying these Diluvial Traditions it is of the highest con-
sequence that he should be able to separate the results of the
memory of real events from those of observation of natural
phenomena and of purely mythological development. Hum-
boldt in part states the problem in his remarks on the four
devastations of the earth, by famine, fire, hurricane, and de-
luge, as represented in the Mexican picture-writing. ‘ What-
ever may be their true origin, it does not appear less certain
that they are fictions of astronomical mythology, modified
either by a dim remembrance of some great revolution which
our planet has undergone, or in accordance with the physical
and geological hypotheses to which the appearance of marine
petrifactions and fossil bones give rise, even among peoples at
the greatest distance from civilization.’’?
1 Aug., ‘ De Civitate Dei,’ xv. ¥. * Humboldt, Vues des Cord., pl. 26.
That the cbservation of shells and corals in places above the
level of the sea, and even on high mountains, should have given
rise to legends of great floods which deposited them there, is
natural enough, and quite consistent with the growth of myths
of monsters and giants from the observation of fossil bones.
Marine productions being found at heights of many hundred
feet above the sea, the question would evidently occur to the
men who speculated so ingeniously about the fossil bones, how
did these productions of the sea get upon the mountains? As
to fossil crustaceans, the Arabian geographer Abu-Zeyd ex-
plains their appearance in Ceylon by setting them down as
sea-animals like craw-fish, which, when they come out of the
sea, are converted into stone,! but the appearance of sea-shells
on mountains could hardly be so accounted for. Two alterna-
tives suggest themselves to explain the occurrence of shells
in such situations; either the sea may have been up to the
mountain, or the mountain may have been down in the sea.
Modern geologists have in most cases to adopt the latter alter-
native, but till recent times the former was oftener than not
held to be the more probable. Water is the type of all that is
movable, fluctuating, unstable, while the firm earth is immoy-
able, permanent, solid, and it is not to the purpose to argue
that modern knowledge has reversed this older view, with so
many other doctrines which seemed to rest on the plain evi-
dence of the senses, and only failed, as many of our own theo-
ries have no doubt to fail, from the narrowness of their range
of observation.
The fossils imbedded in high ground have been appealed to, -
both in ancient and modern times, both by savages and civi-
lized men, as evidence in support of their traditions of a flood,
and moreover the argument, apparently unconnected with any
tradition, is to be found, that because there are marine fossils
in places away from the sea, therefore the sea must once have
been there. In the Society Islands, tradition tells how a flood
that rose over the tops of the mountains, was raised by the
sea-god Ruahatu. <A fisherman caught his hooks in the hair or
the god as he lay sleeping among his coral groves, and woke
1 Tennent, ‘ Ceylon,’ vol. i. p. 14.
him, but, strange to say, though in his anger he drowned the
rest of the inhabitants of the land in the deluge, he allowed
the fisherman himself to find safe refuge with his wife and child
on a small, low, coral-island close to Raiatea, and they re-
peopled the earth. How the little island was preserved they
give no account, but they appeal to the farero, coral, and shells,
found at the tops of the highest mountains, as proof of the
inundation.! In Samoa it is the universal belief that of old
the fish swam where the land now is, and tradition adds that
when the waters abated, many of the fish of the sea were left
on the land, and afterwards were changed into stones. Hence,
they say, there are stones in abundance in the bush and among
the mountains, which were once sharks, and other inhabit-
ants of the deep.” In the North the Moravian missionary
Cranz records that, ‘ The first missionaries found among the
Greenlanders a tolerably distinct tradition of the Deluge, of
which almost all heathen nations still know something, namely,
that the world was once tilted over (umgekantert) and all men
were drowned, but some became fire-spirits. The only man
who remained alive, smote afterwards with his stick upon the
ground, and there came out a woman, with whom he peopled
the earth again. They tell, moreover, that far up in the coun-
try, where men could never have dwelt, there are found all
sorts of remains of fishes, and even bones of whales on a high
mountain ; wherefrom they make it clear that the earth was
once flooded.”? It is interesting to compare this argument
with the explanation the Kamchadals give of the bones of
whales, which in their country also are found on high moun-
tains. They fear all high mountains, says Steller, especially
volcanos, and also hot springs, and believe that some moun-
tains are the abodes of spirits. ‘‘ When one asks them what
the devils do up there, they reply, ‘they cook whales.’ I
asked, where they got them? The answer was, they go down
to the sea at night and catch so many, that one brings home
five to ten of them, one hanging to each finger. When I asked,
how do you know this? they said their Sturiki or old people
1 Ellis, Polyn. Res., vol. ii. p. 58. 2 Turner, ‘ Polynesia,’ p. 249.
3 Cranz, p. 262.
had always said so and believed it themselves. Withal they
appealed to the observation, that there were many bones of
whales found on all burning mountains. I asked whence come
the flames there sometimes, and they answered, when the
spirits have heated up their mountains as we do our yurts, they
fling the rest of the brands out up the chimney, so as to be
able to shut up. They said moreover, God im heaven some-
times does so too at the time when it is our summer and his
winter, and he warms up his yurt ; whereby they explain the
veneration of the lightning.”
In the geological theories of classical times, the inference
from fossil shells found inland, high or low above the sea level,
was commonly that the sea had once been there, though it need
not always follow that it was the sea which had since changed
its level. Herodotus argues from the shells on the mountams
in Egypt,’ and Xanthus from the fossil shells, like cockles and
scallops, which he had seen far from the sea, that there had
been sea in old times where the land had since been lefs dry.
Eratosthenes notices the existence of quantities of oyster-shells
and bits of wreck of seagoing ships near the temple of Ammon,
far inland in Libya, while Strato expresses the opmion that
this temple was once close to the sea, though since thrown
inland by the retiring of the waters. Describing the region
of Numidia farther west, Pomponius Mela relates that, “ In-
land and far enough from the coast (if the thing be credible)
they tell that in a wondrous way the spines of fish, and frag-
ments of murex and oyster-shells, stones worn in the ordinary
manner by the waves and not differing from those of the sea,
anchors fixed in the rocks, and other similar signs and vestiges
of the sea that once spread to those places, exist and are found
on the barren plains.”* So Ovid says in his remarkable state-
ment of the Pythagorean doctrines,—
‘«‘ Et procul a pelago conche jacuere marine
Et vetus inventa est in montibus anchora summis,”
and argues thence that sea has been converted into land.®
1 Steller, p. 47. 2 Herod., ii. 12. 3 Strabo, i. 3, 4.
+ Mela, i. c. 6. 5 Ov. Met., xv. 264.
In the Chinese Encyclopedia from which I have already
quoted two remarkable passages, an account is to be found
bearing on the present subject. “ Hastern Tartary.—In tva-
velling from the shore of the Hastern Sea toward Che-lu,
neither brooks nor ponds are met with in the country, although
it is intersected by mountains and valleys. Nevertheless there
are found in the sand, very far away from the sea, oyster-shells
and the shields of crabs. The tradition of the Mongols who
inhabit the country is that it has been said from time immemo-
rial that in remote antiquity the waters of the deluge flooded
the district, and when they retired, the places where they had
been made their appearance covered with sand. . . . However
it may have happened, to follow the great geographer Ti-chi, a
part of this country is in great plains, where several hundred
leagues are found to have been covered by the waters and since
abandoned ; this is why these deserts are called the Sandy Sea,
which indicates that they were not originally covered with sand
and gravel.’”!
Again, the presence of fossil shells on high mountains has
long been adduced as evidence of the Noachic flood. Thus
Tertullian connects the sea-shells on mountains with the reap-
pearance of the earth from below the waters,? and the argu-
ment may be followed up through later times, and was current
in England till quite recently. In the ninth edition of Horne’s
‘ Introduction to the Scriptures,’ published in 1846, the evi-
dence of fossils is confidently held to prove the universality of
the Deluge; but the argument disappears from the next edi-
tion, published ten years later.
To the statements of classical writers as to anchors and
pieces of wreck being found inland, some more modern ac-
counts must be added. From time to time, whether from up-
heaval of the earth’s surface or other geological changes, ships
and things belonging to them have been found far inland, in
places for ages out of reach of navigable waters. Buffon speaks
of fragments of vessels being found in a mountain lake in Por-
tugal, far from the sea, and mentions a statement of Sabinus,
1 Mém. cone. les Chinois, vol. iv. p. 474. Klemm, C. G., vol. vi. p. 467.
2 Tert., ‘De Pallio, ii. H. F. Link, ‘Die Urwelt,’ ete.; Berlin, 1821, p. 4.
in his commentary on the lines just quoted from Ovid, that in
the year 1460 a vessel was found with its anchors, in a mine in
the Alps.! This is, no doubt, the same story that Antonio
Galvano refers to, when he says, ‘Thus they tell of finding
hulls of ships and iron anchors in the mountains of Switzerland
very far inland, where it appears that there was never sea nor
salt water.’”
The possible bearing of such phenomena on the formation of
diluvial traditions is clearly shown by their having been repeat-
edly claimed, like the fossil shells, as evidence of the former
presence of the sea, and even of the Biblical deluge. It is
not, however, necessary, from this point of view, that the ac-
counts in question should all be true; it is enough that they
should be believed and reasoned upon. In the seventeenth
century, Fray Pedro Simon relates that some miners, running
an adit into a hill near Callao, “met with a ship which had on
top of it the great mass of the hill, and did not agree in its
make and appearance with our ships,’ whence people judged
that it had been left there by the Flood, and the fact is cited m
proof of the habitation of the country in antediluvian times.®
Writing in 1730, Strahlenberg gives it as his opinion that the
mammoth bones in Siberia are relics of the Deluge, and goes
on to add a like example, that some thirty years earlier the
whole lower hull of a ship with a keel was found in Barabinsk
Tartary, where nevertheless there is no ocean.* Lastly, in
Scotland it is quite a common thing for ancient canoes hol-
lowed from a single tree to be found buried in places remote
from navigable channels, while the skeletons of whales are
found in similar situations. Sir John Clerk thus remarks upon
a canoe found near Edinburgh in 1726. ‘‘ The washings of the
river Carron discovered a boat, 13 or 14 feet underground ; it
is 36 feet in length, and 43 in breadth, all of one piece of oak.
There were several strata above it, such as loam, clay, shells,
1 Buffon, ‘Théorie de la Terre,’ vol. ii. p. 119.
2 Galvano, p. 26.
3 Simon, ‘ Noticias Historiales, etc. ; Cuenca, 1627, p. 31.
* Strahlenberg, ‘Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil yon Europa und Asien ;’ Stock-
holm, 1730, p. 396. C. Hamilton Smith, p. 45.
moss, sand, and gravel; these strata demonstrate it to have
been an antediluvian boat.’”!
Both in Scotland and in South America, upheaval of land in
more or less modern times is a recognized fact, and the finding
of boats, as of various other productions of human art, in places
where they could hardly have been placed by man, is readily
accounted for between this upheaval and the effects of ordinary
accumulation and degradation.
Geological evidence bearing on traditions of a Deluge is
scarce. Sir Charles Lyell seems disposed to adopt the view of
old writers that some of the South American deluge traditions
are connected with the memory of local floods, such as are
known to happen there. Dr. Szab6 says that the Hungarians
still preserve traditions of their plains having been once co-
vered by a freshwater sea, the waters of which afterwards
escaped through the narrows of the Iron Gate. The draining of
the country in this manner is considered by Dr. Szabé as hay-
ing really happened, so that this may be a case of tradition
handing down the memory of a geological change from a very
remote period.? It would require a large body of scientific
evidence of this character to make possible a thorough investi-
gation of the Diluvial traditions of the world, and any attempt
to draw a distinct line between the claims of History and My-
thology must in the meantime be premature.
It fortunately happens that the difficulty in analysing the
Diluvial traditions into their historical and mythological ele-
ments is one which only partially affects their use to Hthnology.
Were they merely stories current in various parts of the world,
saying little more than that there was once a great flood, or
giving details only harmonizing within limited districts, they
might be explained as Myths of Observation which had not ne-
cessarily any common origin. There are some which, taken
by themselves, could not stand against this argument, but the
general state of things found over the world is widely different
from this. The notion of men having existed before the flood,
and having been all destroyed except a few who escaped and
1 Bibl. Topog. Brit. ; London, 1790, vol. iii. part i. p. 241. Wilson, ‘ Archeo-
logy, ete. of Scotland,’ p. 32. 2 Geol. Journal, Feb. 1863.
re-peopled the earth, does not flow so immediately from the
observation of natural phenomena that we can easily suppose
it to have originated several times independently in such a way,
yet this is a feature common to the great mass of flood traditions.
Still more strongly does this argument apply to the occurrence
f some form of raft, ark, or canoe, in which the survivors are
usually saved, unless, as im some cases, they take refuge di-
rectly on the top of some mountain which the waters never
cover. The idea is indeed conceivable, if somewhat far-fetched,
that from the sight of a boat found high on a mountain there
might grow a story of the flood which carried it there, while
the people in it escaped to found a new race. But it lies out-
side all reasonable probability to suppose such circumstances
to have produced the same story in several different places, nor
is it very likely that the dim remembrances of a number of local
floods should accord in this with the amount of consistency that
is found among the flood-traditions of remote regions of the
world. The occurrence of an ark in the traditions of a deluge,
found in so many distant times and places, seems to entitle
them to be received as derived from a single source, and thus
forming part of the mass of evidence from art, custom, and be-
lief, which supports the theory of a deep-lying historical con-
nexion of the mental development of the whole human race.
As to Myths of Observation in general, the lme of demar-
cation which separates them on the one hand from traditions of
real events, and on the other from more purely mythic tales,
is equally hard to draw. Even the stories which have their
origin in a mere realized metaphor, or a personification of the
phenomena of nature, will attach themselves to real persons,
places, or objects, as strongly as though they actually belonged
to them. To the subjective mind of the myth maker, every
hill and valley, every stone and tree, that strikes his attention,
becomes the place where some mythic occurrence happened
to gods, or heroes, or fair women, or monsters, or ethereal
beings. When once the tale is made, the rock or tree becomes
evidence of its truth to future generations: ‘the bricks are
alive at this day to testify it; therefore, deny it not.”
Chapter 12
GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF MYTHS.
Tue student of the early History of Mankind finds in Com-
parative Mythology the same use and the same difficulty which
he before him in so many other branches of his subject. He
can sometimes show, in the mythical tales current among
several peoples, coincidences so quaint, so minute, or so com-
plex, that they could hardly have arisen independently in two
places, and these coincidences he claims as proofs of historical
connexion between the tribes or nations among whom they
are found. But his great difficulty is how to be sure that he
is not interpreting as historical evidence analogies which may
be nothing more than the results of the like working of the
human mind under like conditions. His ever-recurring pro-
blem is to classify the crowd of resemblances which are con-
tinually thrusting themselves upon him, so as to keep those
things which are merely similar apart from those which, having
at some spot of the earth’s surface their common source and
centre of diffusion, are really and historically united.
No attempt is made in the present chapter to lay down de-
finite rules for the solution of this important problem, but a
few illustrations are given of the more general analogies run-
ning through the Folk-lore of the world, which Ethnology, for
the present at least, has to set aside; and then a few facts are
stated, bearing on the diffusion of Myths by recognized chan-
nels of intercourse, with the view of introducing a group of
similar episodes, which it is for the reader to reject as caused
by independent growth or modern transmission, or to accept
as a contribution to the early History of the New World.
Firstly, then, there are found among savage tribes myths
like in their character, and therefore no doubt in their origin,
to those of the great Aryan race which have in our own times
been so successfully traced to the very point where they arose
out of the contemplation of nature. No one has yet done for
the myths of the lowest tribes what has been done for those
of our more highly developed race by Kuhn and Miiller, and
their school in Germany and England; but Schirren, by his
treatment of the gods and mythic ancestors of the South Sea
Islanders as personifications of the phenomena of nature, has
made an important step toward extending the modern method
of interpretation to the Mythology of the World.! Still, a very
slight acquaintance with the popular tales of America, Poly-
nesia, even Australia and Van Diemen’s Land, will show that
they are the same in their nature and often im their incidents,
by virtue of the like nature of the minds which conceived them.
As Zeus, the personified Heaven of our own race, drops
tears on earth which mortals call rain, so does the heaven-god
of Tahiti ;
“ Thickly falls the small rain on the face of the sea,
They are not drops of rain, but they are tears of Oro.””?
In the dark patches on the face of the moon, the Singhalese
sees the pious hare that offered itself to Buddha to be cooked
and eaten, when he was wandering hungry in the forest. The
Northman saw there the two children whom Mani the Moon
caught up, as they were taking the water from the well Byrgir,
and who are carrying the bucket on the pole between them
to this day. Elsewhere in Europe, Isaac has been seen carry-
ing the bundle of wood up Mount Moriah for his own sacrifice,
and Cain bringing from his field a load of thorns as his offermg
to Jehovah. Our own ‘ Man in the Moon” was set up there
for picking sticks on a Sunday, and he, too, carries his thorn-
bush, as Caliban had seen, ‘‘I have seen thee im her, and I do
' Schirren, ‘Die Wandersagen der Neuseeliinder und der Mauimythos;’ Riga,
1856. 2 Ellis, Polyn. Res., vol. i. p. 581.
adore thee ; my mistress showed me thee, thy dog, and bush.”
In the Samoan Islands in the Central Pacific, the dweller in
the moon is a woman. Her name was Sina, and she was beat-
ing out paper-cloth with a mallet. The moon was just rising,
and looked like a great bread-fruit, so Sina asked her to come
down and let her child have a bit of her. But the moon was
very angry at the idea of being eaten, and took up Sina, child,
and mallet and all, and there they are to be seen to this day.!
The heavenly bodies are gods and heroes, and tales of their
deeds in love and arms are found among the lower as among
the higher races. Apollo and Artemis, Helios and Selene, are
brother and sister, and so in the Polar Regions the Sun is a
maiden and the Moon her brother. The HEsquimaux tale tells
how, when the girl was at a festive gathering, some one de-
clared his love for her by shaking her by the shoulders, after
the manner of the country. She could not tell who it was in
the dark hut, so she smeared her hand with soot, and when he
came back, she blackened his face with her hand. Whena
light was brought, she saw it was her brother, and fled, and he
rushed after her. She came to the end of the earth and sprang
out into the sky, and he followed her. There they became the
Sun and Moon, and this is why the moon is always chasing
the sun through the heavens ; and the moon is sometimes dark
as he turns his blackened cheek toward the earth.”
The natives of Van Diemen’s Land, whose dismal history is
now closing in total extinction, are among the lowest tribes
known to Ethnology. Yet to them, as to higher races, the
idea is familiar that the stars are men, or beings of a higher
order who have appeared as men on earth. Their myth of the
two heroes who are now the twin stars Castor and Pollux, is
thus told by Milligan, as related by a native of the Oyster Bay
Tribe ;
“ My father, my grandfather, all of them lived a long time
ago, all over the country ; they had no fire. Two black-fellows
came, they slept at the foot of a hill,—a hill in my own coun-
try. On the summit of a hill they were seen by my fathers,
1 Grimm, D. M., pp. 679-83. Turner, p. 247. See Mariner, vol. ii. p. 127.
2 Hayes, ‘Arctic Boat Journey,’ p. 253. A different version in Cranz, p. 295.
my countrymen, on the top of the hill they were seen standing :
they threw fire like a star,—it fell amongst the blackmen, my
countrymen. They were frightened,—they fled away, all of
them ; after a while they returned, they hastened and made a
fire,—a fire with wood ; no more was fire was lost in our land.
The two black-fellows are in the clouds; in the clear night you
see them like two stars.1_ These are they who brought fire to
my fathers.
The two blackmen staid awhile in the land of my fathers. -
Two women were bathing; it was near a rocky shore, where
mussels were plentiful. ‘The women were sulky, they were
sad; their husbands were faithless, they had gone with two
girls. The women were lonely ; they were swimming in the
water, they were diving for cray-fish. A sting-ray lay concealed
in the hollow of a rock,—a large sting-ray ! The sting-ray was
large, he had a very long spear; from his hole he spied the
women, he saw them dive: he pierced them with his spear,—
he killed them, he carried them away. Awhile they were
gone out of sight. The sting-ray returned, he came close to
the shore, he lay in still water, near the sandy beach; with
him were the women, they were fast on his spear,—they were
dead !
The two blackmen fought the sting-ray; they slew him
with their spears; they killed him ;—the women were dead !
The two blackmen made a fire,—a fire of wood. On either
side they laid a woman,—the fire was between: the women
were dead !
The blackmen sought some ants, some large blue ants ;
they placed them on the bosoms of the women. Severely, in-
tensely were they bitten. The women revived,—they lived
once more.
Soon there came a fog, a fog dark as night. The two black-
men went away, the women disappeared: they passed through
the fog, the thick dark fog! Their place is in the clouds.
Two stars you see in the clear cold night; the two blackmen
are there,—the women are with them: they are stars above.’’?
1 Castor and Pollux.
? Milligan, Papers, etc., of R. Soc. of Tasmania, vol. iii. part ii. 1859, p. 274.
It is not needful to accumulate great masses of such tales as
these, in order to show that the myth-making faculty belongs
to mankind in general, and manifests itself in the most distant
regions, where its unity of principle developes itself in endless
variety of form. There may indeed be a remote historical con-
nexion at the root of some of the analogies in myths from far
distant regions, which have just been mentioned; but when
resemblances in Mythology are brought forward as proofs of
such historical connexion, they must be closer and deeper than
these. Mythological evidence, to be used for such a purpose,
requires a systematic agreement in the putting together of a
number of events or ideas, which agreement must be so close
as to make it in a high degree improbable that two such com-
binations should have occurred separately, or at least the tales
or ideas found alike in distant regions must be of so quaint and
fantastic a character as to make it, on the very face of the
matter, unlikely that they should have been invented twice.
But it is both easier and safer to appeal to the effects of
known intercourse between different peoples in spreading be-
hefs and popular tales, as evidence of the way in which histo-
rical connexion really does record itself in Mythology, than to
lay down @ priori rules as to what the effects of such connexion
ought to be.
When we consider how short the time is since the Indians
of North America have been acquainted with guns, the fact that
there has been recorded, as one of their native beliefs, the no-
tion that there are men who have charmed lives, and can only
be killed with a silver bullet, may prepare us for the way in
which savages can take up foreign mythology into their own.
Again, it might be naturally expected that Bible stories learnt
from missionaries, settlers, and travellers, should pass in a more
or less altered shape into the folk-lore of savage races. Moffat
gives a good instance which happened to himself. He had
never succeeded in finding a deluge-tradition in South Africa,
but making inquiries in a Namaqua village, he came upon a
somewhat intelligent native who had one to tell, so he began
with great satisfaction to take it down in writing. By the time
it was finished, however, he began to suspect, for it bore the
impress of the Bible, though the Hottentot declared that he had
received it from his forefathers, and had never seen or heard
of a missionary. Mr. Moffat was puzzled, and suspended his
judgment till, a little while afterwards, the mystery was un-
ravelled by the appearance of the very missionary from whom
the native story-teller had received his teaching.! As another
case of the same kind, may be quoted the following servile
version of the story of Joseph and his brethren, found in Ha-
wail as the story of Waikelenuiaiku. His father had ten sons
and one daughter ; he was beloved by his father, and hated by
his brethren, and they threw him into a pit, but his eldest
brother felt more compassion for him than the rest. He es-
caped out of the pit, into the country of King Kamohoalii, and
there he was confined in a dungeon with the prisoners. He
bade his companions dream, and interpreted the dreams of four
of them. One had seen a ripe banana, and his spirit ate it, the
next dreamt of a banana, and the next of a hog, in the same
way, but the fourth dreamt that he saw awa, that he pressed
out the juice, and his spirit drank it. The three first dreams
the foreigner interpreted for evil, and the dreamers were put
to death in course of time, but to the fourth he prophesied de-
liverance and life, and he was saved, and told the King, who
set Waikelenuiaiku at liberty, and made him a principal chief
in the kingdom.?
There is sometimes a crudeness about these tales adopted
from foreign sources, which gives us the means of positively
condemning them. But the power which myths have of tak-
ing root the moment they are transplanted into a new country,
often makes it impossible to tell whether they are of old date
and historical value, or mere modern intruders. ‘There is rea-
son to’believe that a story carried into a distant place by civi-
lized men may spread and accommodate itself to the circum-
stances of the country, so that in a very few years’ time it
may be quite honestly collected as a genuine native tale, even
by the very people who originally introduced it, like the farmer’s
hack that he sold in the morning, and bought back in the af-
1 Moffat, ‘ Missionary Labours, etc., in 8. Africa ;’ London, 1842, p. 126.
2 Hopkins, ‘ Hawaii ;’ London, 1862, p. 67.
ternoon with a fresh mane and tail, as a new horse. Of course
this is the same kind of diffusion of myths which has been
going on from remote ages among mankind, one of the very
processes which have preserved to Ethnology aids of such high
importance for the reconstruction of early history. It is only
unfortunate that its results in modern times, by confounding
the evidence of early and late intercourse between different
peoples, have done so much to impair its historical value.
Among the stories found in circulation among outlying races,
there are many, beside those relating to a Deluge, which appear
to be really united by ancient and deep-lying bonds of con-
nexion with Biblical episodes, and the extreme difficulty, or
impossibility, of separating a great part of these ancient stories
from those which have grown up in modern times under Chris-
tian influences, is a very serious loss to early history. Still it
is better to submit to this, than to base Ethnological arguments
on evidence that will not bear the test of criticism. It is not
only to Scriptural stories that this objection lies. Episodes
from the classics and other European sources may be carried
into distant lands by colonists and missionaries, and it may be
laid down as a general rule, that stories which may have been
transplanted in this way in modern times, must be rejected as
independent evidence of remote intercourse between distant
races among whom ‘they are found. It is when a connexion
between two peoples has been already made probable by eyi-
dence not liable to be thus impeached, that these stories can be
taken into consideration as secondary evidence, which, once
proved to be safe, may be of extraordinary interest and value.
Before proceeding to the comparison of a number of Ameri-
can myths with their analogues in the Old World, it is to be
premised that the view of a connexion between the inhabitants
of America and Asia by no means rests on one of those vague
and misty theories, which have too often been allowed to pass
current as solid Hthnological arguments. The researches of
Alexander von Humboldt brought into view, half a century
ago, evidence which goes with great force to prove that the
civilization of Mexico and that of Asia have, in part at least,
a common origin, and that therefore the population of these
regions are united, if not by the tie of common descent and
relationship by blood, at least by intercourse, direct or indirect,
in past times. Of this evidence, the similarity of the chro-
nological calendars is perhaps the strongest point. Not only
are series of names like our signs of the zodiac used to re-
cord periods of time, but such series are combined together, or
with numbers, in both countries, in a complex, perverse, and
practically purposeless manner, which, whatever its origin, can
hardly by any stretch of probability be supposed to have come
up independently in the minds of two different peoples. The
theory of the successive destructions and renovations of the
world, at the end of long cycles of years, was pointed out by
Humboldt as another bond of connexion between Mexico and
the Old World; and these agreements between North America
and Asia can hardly be read but as indications of a deep-rooted
connexion, which ought to have left many other traces beside
these. Of customs, the occurrence of which in America as
well as in the Old World would be well explained by such a
view, something has already been said. Of the North or South
American myths which closely resemble tales current in Asia,
Polynesia, and elsewhere in the world, eight are discussed here,
the World-Tortoise, the Man swallowed by the Fish, the Sun-
Catcher, the Ascent to Heaven by the Tree, the Bridge of the
Dead, the Fountain of Youth, the Tail-Fisher, and the Diable
Boiteux.
In the Old World, the Tortoise Myth belongs especially to
India, and the idea is developed there in a variety of forms.
The Tortoise that upholds the earth is called in Sanskrit
Kirmardja, “ King of the Tortoises,” and the Hindoos believe
to this day that the world rests upon its back. Sometimes the
snake Sesha bears the world on its head, or an elephant carries
it upon its back, and both snake and elephant are themselves
supported by the great tortoise. The earth, rescued from the
deluge which destroys mankind, is set up with the snake that
bears it resting on the floating tortoise, anda deluge is again to
pour over the face of the earth when the world-tortoise, sink-
ing under its load, goes down into the great waters. When
the Daityas and Danavas churned the Sea of Milk to make the
vo ie a
amrita, the drink of immortality, they took the mountain Man-
*dara for the churning-stick, and the serpent Vasuki was the
thong that was wound round it, and pulled back and forwards to
drive the churn. In the midst of the milky sea, Vishnu him-
self, in the form of a tortoise, served as a pivot for the mountain
as it was whirled around.
The notion of the earth being itself a great tortoise swim-
ming in the midst of the ocean, is thus described by Reinaud :—
“ According to Varaiha-Mihira, the Indians represented to
themselves the inhabited part of the world under the form of a
tortoise floating upon the water; it is in this sense that they
call the World Kauwrma-chakra, that is to say, ‘the wheel of
the tortoise.” ”’? And lastly, the ancient Vedic Books of India,
which so often supply the means of tracing the most florid de-
velopments of mythology back to mere simple child-like views
of nature, present, as really existing in very early times, the
original idea out of which the whole series of myths of the
World-Tortoise seems to have grown. To man in the lower
levels of science, the earth is a flat plain over which the sky is
placed like a dome, as the arched upper shell of the tortoise
stands upon the flat plate below, and this is why the tortoise is
the symbol and representative of the World. The analogy of
other conceptions of heaven and earth, as formed by the two
halves of the shell of Brahma’s Ege, or by the two calabashes
shut together in the mythology of the Yorubas of Africa,? is
indeed sufficient to lead us to the opinion that this was the
original meaning of the World-Tortoise, but the following pas-
sage from Weber will enable us to substitute fact for inference.
1 Boehtlingk & Roth, s.v. Kirma. Wilson, s.v. Kirmaraja. Coleman, p. 12.
Vans Kennedy, ‘ Researches ;’? London, 1831, pp. 216, 243. Holwell, ‘ Historical
Eyents,’ etc.; London, 1766-7, part ii. p. 109. Falconer, in Proc. Zool. Soc.,
1844, p. 86. Baldzus, in Churchill’s Voyages, vol. iii. p. 848. Wilson, ‘ Vishnu
Purana ;’ London, 1840, p. 75. W. v. Humboldt (Kawi-Spr., vol. i. p. 240) says
with reference to the Naga Padoha, the great snake on whose three horns the world
rests,—“ It seems to me not unlikely, that the idea of a world-bearing elephant lies
at the bottom of the whole saga [of the snake, that is] and that the double mean-
ing of Sanskrit naga, elephant and snake, has brought confusion into the story.”
? Reinaud, ‘ Mémoire sur l’Inde;’ Paris, 1849, p. 116.
3 Pott, ‘ Anti-Kaulen ;’ Lemgo, 1863, p. 68.
“The earth is conceived in the Catapatha Brahmana as the
under shell (adharam kapilam) of the Tortoise Karma, which *
represents the Triple World. The upper shell is the sky, the
body lymg between the two shells is the atmosphere (nabhas,
antari-ksham) which connects them.’’!
There are tales to be found in the Old World that seem
remnants of the great Indian myth of the World-Tortoise,
which have degenerated, as myths so often do when they come
down into an age which has quite lost the consciousness of their
meaning, into mere wonder-tales. It is related in the first
voyage of Sindbad, that he and his companions came, as they
sailed along, to an island like one of the gardens of Paradise,
and there they anchored the ship, and went ashore, and lighted
fires to cook food. But the island was a great fish, on whose
back sand had accumulated, and trees had grown from times
of old, and when it felt the fire on its back, it moved and went
down to the bottom of the sea. In El-Kazwini’s account of
the animals of the water, there is a version of this story, which
describes the creature as a huge tortoise; ‘‘ The tortoise,” he
says, “is a sea and land animal. As to the sea-tortoise, it is
very enormous, so that the people of the ship imagine that it is
an island. One of the merchants hath related, saying, ‘ We
found in the sea an island elevated above the water, having
upon it green plants; and we went forth to it, and dug [holes
for fire] to cook ; whereupon the island moved, and the sailors
said, Come ye to your place; for it is a tortoise, and the heat
of the fire hath hurt it; lest it carry you away !—By reason of
the enormity of its body,’ saith he (i.e. the narrator above
mentioned), ‘it was as though it were an island ; and earth col-
lected upon its back in the length of time, so that it became
like land, and produced plants.’ ””?
The striking analogy between the Tortoise-myths of North
America and India is by no means a matter of new observation ;
| Weber, ‘ Indische Studien ;’ Berlin, 1850, ete., vol. i. p. 187. See also p. 81.
I may mention having set down this conception as the probable basis of the Tor-
toise-myths before meeting with this direct evidence from ancient India. The
coincidence defends such an interpretation of the myths from the charge of being
far-fetched and fanciful. .
? Lane, ‘The Thousand and One Nights,’ London, 1859, vol. iii. pp. 6, 79.
it was indeed remarked upon by Father Lafitau nearly a cen-
tury and a half ago.! Three great features of the Asiatic
stories are found among the North American Indians, in the
fullest and clearest development. The earth is supported on
the back of a huge floating Tortoise, the Tortoise sinks under
water and causes a deluge, and the Tortoise is conceived as
being itself the Harth floating upon the face of the deep.
In the last century, Loskiel, the Moravian missionary, re-
marked of the North American Indians, that “Some imagine,
that the earth swims in the sea, or that an enormous tortoise
carries the world on its back.” Schoolcraft, an unrivalled
authority on Indian mythology within his own district, remarks
that the turtle is “an object held in great respect, in all Indian
reminiscence. It is believed to be, in all cases, a symbol of
the earth, and is addressed as a mother.” In the Iroquois
mythology, there was a woman of heaven who was called Ata-
hentsic, and one of the six men of heaven became enamoured
of her. When it was discovered, she was cast down to earth,
and received on the back of a great turtle lyg on the waters,
and there she was delivered of twins. One was “The Good
Mind,” the other was “The Bad Mind,” and thus the two
great powers of the Indian dualism, the Good and Evil Prin-
ciple, came into the world, and the tortoise expanded ‘and be-
came the earth,® or, as it is elsewhere related, the otter and the
fishes disturbed the mud at the bottom of the ocean, and draw-
ing it up round the tortoise, formed a small island, which, gra-
dually increasing, became the earth. Father Charlevoix gives
two different versions of the story. In one place it is Taron-
yawagon, the King of Heaven, who gave his wife so mighty a
kick that she flew out of the sky and down to earth, and fell
upon the back of a tortoise, which, cleaving the waters of the
deluge with its feet, at last uncovered the earth, and carried
the woman to the foot of a tree, where she was delivered of
twin sons, and the elder, who was called Tawiskaron, killed his
younger brother. In another place the story is like School-
craft’s.2 Among the Mandans, Catlin found a legend which
1 Lafitau, vol. i. p. 99. 2 Loskiel, part i. p. 30.
3 Schoolcraft, part i. pp. 390, 316. 4 Coleman, p. 15.
5 Charlevoix, vol. vi. pp. 146, 65.
brings in the same notion of the World-tortoise, but shows by
the difference of the accessory circumstances that it was not in
America a mere part of a particular story, but a mythological
conception which might be worked into an unlimited variety of
myths. The tale that the Mandan doctor told Catlin, was that
the earth was a large tortoise, that it carried dirt upon its back,
and that a tribe of people who are now dead, and whose faces
were white, used to dig down very deep in this ground to catch
badgers. One day they stuck a knife through the shell of the
tortoise, and it sank and sank till the water ran over its back,
and they were all drowned but one man.
The Myth of the World-Tortoise is one of those which have
this great value in the comparison of Asiatic and American
Mythology, that it leaves not the least opening for the supposi-
tion of its haying been carried by modern Europeans from the
Old to the New World. But it is to be seen, even from the
tales which have just been quoted, that it is mixed up in Ame-
rica with incidents and ideas more familiar to the Huropean
mind; and the stories told only with reference to the World-
Tortoise may serve to give a glimpse into the vast ethnological
field which lies in the Red Indian traditions, ready to bs
worked. The Deluge, Cain and Abel, Ahriman and Ormuzd,
Romulus and Remus, all have their analogies among the le-
gends of these wild hunters. In the story which Charlevoix
tells just before that which I have quoted, there is Noah’s
raven and Pandora’s casket.
To proceed now to the story of the Man swallowed by the
Fish. It is related in the Chippewa tale of the Little Monedo,
that there was once a little boy, of tiny stature, and growing
no bigger with years, but of monstrous strength. He had
done before various wondrous feats, and one day he waded into
the lake, and called ‘‘ You of the red fins, come and swallow
me.” Immediately that monstrous fish came and swallowed
him, and he, seeing his sister standing in despair on the shore,
called out to her, and she tied an old mocassin to a string, and
fastened it to a tree near the water’s edge. The fish said to
the boy-man under water, “‘ What is that floating?” The boy-
1 Catlin, vol. i. p. 181.
man said to the fish, ‘“‘ Go take hold of it, and swallow it as fast
as you can.” ‘The fish darted towards the old shoe, and swal-
lowed it; the boy-man laughed to himself, but said nothing
till the fish was fairly caught, and then he took hold of the line
and hauled himself to shore. When the sister began to cut
the fish open she heard her brother’s voice from inside the fish,
calling to her to let him out, so she made a hole, and he crept
through, and told her to cut up the fish and dry it, for it would
last them a long while for food.
In the Old World, the Hindoo story of Saktideva tells that
there was once a king’s daughter who would marry no one but
the man who had seen the Golden City, and Saktideva was in
love with her; so he went travelling about the world seeking
some one who could tell him where this Golden City was. In
the course of his journeys he embarked on board a ship bound
for the island of Utsthala, where lived the King of the Fisher-
men, who, Saktideva hoped, would set him on his way. On
the voyage there arose a great storm and the ship went to
pieces, but a great fish swallowed Saktideva whole. Then,
driven by the force of fate, the fish went to the island of Uts-
thala, and there the servants of the King of the Fishermen
caught it, and the King, wondering at its size, had it cut open,
and Saktideva came out unhurt, to pass through other adven-
tures, and at last to see the Golden City, and to marry, not the
Princess only, but her three sisters beside.”
The analogy of these curious tales with the leading episode
of the Book of Jonah is of course evident, and it might ap-
pear as though this very ancient story were possibly the direct
origin of one or both of them ; as regards dates, the American
story has been but recently taken down, and even the Hindoo
tale only comes out of a medieval Sanskrit collection. But
both agree in differing from the history of Jonah, in the fish
_ being cut open to let the man out. Something very like this
occurs in the myth of the Polynesian Sun-god Maui. He was
born on the sea-shore, and his mother flung him into the foam
of the surf; then the seaweed wrapped its long tangles round
1 Schoolcraft, part ii. pp. 318-20.
? Somadeva Bhatta, vol. ii. pp. 118-184.
him, and the soft jelly-fish rolled themselves about him to pro-
tect him as he was drifted on shore again, and his great an-
cestor the Sky, Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, saw the flies and the
birds collected in clusters and flocks, and ran and stripped the
encircling jelly-fish off, and behold there lay within a human
being ; so the old man took the child and carried it home.’ As
the Polynesian Maui is among the clearest and completest per-
sonifications of the Sun, there is some force in Schirren’s argu-
ment that this story means the Sun being set free by the Sky
at dawn, from the Earth which covers him at night ;? for it
must be remembered here that one of the most prominent ideas
of the Polynesian Mythology is that the Harth is a huge fish,
which Maui draws up with his line from the bottom of the sea,
and that Maui’s death, the sunset, is told in the story of his
creeping into the mouth of his great ancestress, Hine-nui-te-po,
whom you may see flashing, and, as it were, opening and shut-
ting, where the horizon meets the sky; there Maui crept in,
and perished. And not only would such an explanation of the
tale of the Red Indian ‘Tom Thumb’ be a fitting one, in that
he, like so many personifications of the Sun in other countries,
is a slayer of Giants, but he will appear a few pages further on
as the Sun-Catcher in a plain, open Solar myth. In any full
discussion of the group of tales, it would be necessary to inves-
tigate their correspondence with the European stories of ‘Tom
Thumb, who was swallowed by the cow and came out unhurt,
and of Little Red Riding-Hood, who was swallowed whole by
the wolf, and came out alive when the hunter cut him open.’
In the next myth, that of the Sun-Catcher, the Polynesian
Sun-god Maui again makes his appearance. He began to
think that it was too soon after the rising of the sun that it
became night again, and that the sun again sank down below
the horizon, every day, every day; so at last he said to his
brothers, “‘ Let us now catch the sun in a noose, so that we
may compel him to move more slowly, in order that mankind
may have long days to labour in to procure subsistence for
1 Grey, ‘ Polynesian Mythology,’ pp. 18, 31.
2 Schirren, pp. 143-44, 29. But the legend is very erroneously given.
3 J. & W. Grimm, ‘ Marchen,’ vol. i. pp. 142, 198, 28.
themselves.” Then they began to spin and twist ropes to
make a noose to catch the sun in, and thus the art of rope-
making was discovered. And Maui took his enchanted weapon,
which, like Samson’s, was a jawbone, the jawbone of his an-
cestress Muri-ranga-whenua, and he and his brothers travelled
off through the desert, till they came very far, very far, to the
eastward, to the very edge of the place out of which the sun
rises. There they set the noose, and at last the sun came up
and put his head and fore-paws through it; then the brothers
pulled the ropes tight and held him fast, and Maui rushed
at him with his magic weapon. Alas! the sun screams aloud,
he roars; Maui strikes him fiercely with many blows; they
hold him for a long time, at last they let him go, and then,
weak from wounds, the sun crept slowly along its course.!
Another version of the story was taken down in the Samoan
Islands. There was once a man who, like the white people,
though it was years before pipes, muskets, or priests were
heard of, never could be contented with what he had; pud-
ding was not good enough for him, and he worried his family
out of all heart with his new ways and ideas. At last he set
to build himself a house of great stones, to last for ever ; so he
rose early and toiled late, but the stones were so heavy and so
far off, and the sun went round so quickly, that he could get on
but very slowly. One evening he lay awake, and thought
and thought, and it struck him that as the sun had but one
road to come by, he might stop him and keep him till the
work was done. So he rose before the dawn, and pulling out
in his canoe as the.sun rose, he threw a rope round his neck ;
but no, the sun marched on and went his course unchecked.
He put nets over the place where the sun rose, he used up all
his mats to stop him, but in vain; the sun went on, and laughed
in hot winds at all his efforts. Meanwhile the house stood still,
and the builder fairly despaired. At last the great Itu, who
generally lies on his mats, and cares not at all for those he has
made, turned round and heard his cry, and, because he was a
good warrior, sent him help. He made the facehere creeper
grow, and again the poor man sprang up from the ground near
1 Grey, ‘ Polynesian Mythology,’ pp. 35-8. ‘
zZ2
his house, where he had lain down in despair. He took his
canoe and made a noose of the creeper. It was the bad season,
when the sun is dull and heavy; so up he came, half asleep
and tired, nor looked about him, but put his head into the
noose. He pulled and jerked, but Itu had made it too strong.
The man built his house—the sun cried and cried, till the
island of Savai was nearly drowned ; but not till the last stone
was laid, was he suffered to resume his career. None can break
the facehere. It is the Itu’s cord.?
Other versions of this episode in the great Maui-myth have
been taken down in the Pacific Islands,” and a like variety is
found in the corresponding tales from North America. Among
the Ojyibwas, the Sun-Catcher is evidently the same personage
as the Boy swallowed by the Fish in the last group of stories.
At the time when the animals reigned in the earth, they
had killed all but a girl and her little brother, and these two
were living in fear and seclusion. The boy never grew bigger
than a little child, and his sister used to take him out with her
when she went to get food for the lodge-fire, for he was too
little to leave alone; a big bird might have flown away with
him. One day she made him a bow and arrows, and told him
to hide where she had been chopping, and when the snow-
birds came to pick the worms out of the wood, he was to shoot
one. That day he tried in vain to kill one, but the next, to-
ward nightfall, she heard his little footsteps on the snow ; he
brought in a bird, and told his sister she was to take off the
skin and to put half the bird at a time into the pottage, for
till then men had not begun to eat animal food, but had lived
on vegetables alone. At last the boy had killed ten birds, and
his sister made him a little coat of the skins. “ Sister,” said
he one day, “are we all alone in the world? Is there nobody
else living?”? Then she told him that those they feared, and
who had destroyed their relatives, lived in a certain part, and
he must by no means go that way; but this only made him
eager to go, and he took his bow and arrows and started.
1 Walpole, ‘Four Years in the Pacific,’ vol. ii. p. 375.
? Turner, ‘Polynesia,’ pp. 245, 248. Tyerman & Bennet, vol. ii. p. 40; and
see vol. i. p, 433. Ellis, Polyn. Res., vol. ii. p. 415.
When he had walked a long while, he lay down on a knoll,
where the sun had melted the snow, and fell fast asleep; but
while he was sleeping the sun beat so hot upon him, that his
bird-skin coat was all singed and shrunk. When he awoke
and found his coat spoilt, he vowed vengeance against the sun,
and bade his sister make hima snare. She made him one of
deer’s sinew, and then one of her own hair, but they would not
do. At last she brought him one that was right; he pulled it
between his lips, and, as he pulled, it became a red metal cord.
With this he set out a little after midnight, and fixed his snare
on a spot just where the sun would strike the land, as it rose
above the earth’s disc, and sure enough he caught the sun, so
that it was held fast in the cord and did not rise. The animals
who ruled the earth were immediately put into a great commo-
tion. They had no light. They called a council to debate upon
the matter, and to appoint some one to go and cut the cord, for
this was a very hazardous enterprise, as the rays of the sun
would burn whoever came so near. At last the dormouse un-
dertook it, for at this time the dormouse was the largest animal
in the world. When it stood up it looked like a mountain.
When it got to the place where the sun was snared, its back
began to smoke and burn with the intensity of the heat, and
the top of its carcass was reduced to enormous heaps of ashes.
It succeeded, however, in cutting the cord with its teeth, and
freemg the sun; but it was reduced to a very small size, and
has remained so ever since.!
In this North American tale we have the Sun-Catcher of the
South Sea Islands, combined with part of our own Jack and
the Beanstalk. As Jack, in spite of his mother’s prayers, goes
up the ladder that is to take him to the dwelling of the Giant
who killed his father, so the boy of the American tale will not
heed his sister’s persuasion, but goes to seek the enemies who
had slain his kindred. In the next two versions, also from
North America, the incident of the going up a tree to the coun-
try in the sky, as Jack goes up his beanstalk, makes its appear-
ance. And in all three, the loosing of the imprisoned sun is
1 Schooleraft, ‘Onéota;? New York and London, 1845, p. 75. See ante,
p. 312.
told in a story of which the European fable of the Lion and the
Mouse might be a mere moralized remnant.
In the story found among the Wyandots, in the seventeenth
century, by the missionary Paul le Jeune, it is related that
there was a child whose father was killed and eaten by a bear,
and his mother by the Great Hare; a woman came and found
the child, and adopted him as her little brother, calling him
Chakabech. He did not grow bigger than a baby, but he was
so strong that the trees served as arrows for his bow. When
he had killed the destroyers of his parents, he wished to go up
to heaven, and climbed up a tree; then he blew upon it, and it
grew up and up till he came up to heaven, and there he found
a beautiful country. So he went down to fetch his sister,
building huts as he went down to lodge her in; brought her
up the tree into heaven, and then broke off the tree low down:
so no one can go up to heaven that way. Then Chakabech
went out and set his snares for game, but when he got up at
night to look at them, he found everything on fire, and went
back to his sister to tell her. Then she told him he must have
caught the Sun, going along by night he must have got im un-
awares, and when Chakabech went to see, so it was; but he
dared not go near enough to let him out. But by chance he
found a little Mouse, and blew upon her till she grew so big
that she could set the Sun free, and he went again on his
way; but while he was held in the snare, day failed down here
on earth.'
The first and second American versions of the Sun-Catcher
come from near the great lakes, but the third is found among
the Dog-Rib Indians, far in the north-west, close upon the
Esquimaux who fringe the northern coast. When Chapewee,
after the deluge, formed the earth, and landed the animals upon
it from his canoe, he “‘ stuck up a piece of wood, which became
a fir-tree, and grew with amazing rapidity, until its top reached
the skies. A squirrel ran up this tree, and was pursued by
Chapewee, who endeavoured to knock it down, but could not
1 Le Jeune (1637) in ‘Relations des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle-France ;’
Quebec, 1858, vol.i. p.54. Schoolcraft, part ii. p. 320. See also page 336, in the
present Chapter.
-_
overtake it. He continued the chase, however, until he reached
the stars, where he found a fine plain, and a beaten road. In
this road he set a snare, made of his sister’s hair, and then re-
turned to the earth. The sun appeared as usual in the heavens
in the morning, but at noon it was caught by the snare which
Chapewee had set for the squirrel, and the sky was instantly
darkened. Chapewee’s family on this said to him, you must
have done something wrong when you were aloft, for we no
longer enjoy the light of day. ‘I have,’ replied he, ‘but it was
unintentionally.’ Chapewee then endeavoured to repair the
fault he had committed, and sent a number of animals up the
tree to release the sun by cutting the snare, but the intense
heat of that luminary reduced them all to ashes. The efforts
of the more active animals being thus frustrated, a ground
mole, though such a grovelling and awkward beast, succeeded
by burrowing under the road in the sky until it reached and
cut asunder the snare which bound the sun. It lost its eyes,
however, the instant it thrust its head into the light, and its
nose and teeth have ever since been brown, as if burnt.’’!
The origin of the story of the Sun-Catcher is not yet clear,
but probably some piece of unequivocal evidence will be found
to explain it. It may be noticed that there are to be found in
the Old World ideas of the sun being bound with a cord to-
hold it in check. In Reynard the Fox, the day is bound with
a rope, and its bonds only let it come slowly on. In a Hun-
garian tale midnight and dawn are bound, so that they can get
no farther towards men.? This notion is curiously like the
Peruvian story of the Inca who denied the pretension of the
Sun to be the doer of all things, for if he were free, he would
go and visit other parts of the heavens where he had never
been. He is, said the Inca, like a tied beast who goes ever
round and round in the same track.®
The legend of the Ascent to Heaven by the Tree has just
1 Richardson, Narr. of Franklin’s Second Exp.; London, 1828, p. 291.
2 Grimm, D.M., p. 706. See Steinthal, ‘Die Sage you Simson,’ in Lazarus &
Steinthal’s ‘ Zeitschrift ;? Berlin, 1862, vol. i. p. 141.
3 Garcilaso de la Vega, part i. viii. 8. See also Acosta, Hist. del Nuevo Orbe,
chap. v.
been brought forward in two of its American versions,! taken
down at periods two centuries apart, and among tribes not
only separated by long distance, but speaking languages of
two distinct families, and yet in both cases embodying also the
story of the Sun-Catcher. A further examination of the story
of Jack and the Bean Stalk, and the analogous tales which are
spread through the Malay and Polynesian districts and North
America, will bring into view the vast ramifications of a mythic
episode flourishing far and wide in these distant regions, though
so scantily represented in the folk-lore of Europe.
Once upon a time there was a poor widow, and she had one
son, and his name was Jack. One day she sent him to sell the
cow, but when he saw some pretty-coloured beans that the
butcher had, he was so delighted that he gave the cow for them
and brought his prize home in triumph. When the poor mother
saw the beans that Jack had brought home she flung them
away, and they grew and grew till next morning they had
grown right up into thesky. So Jack climbed up sorely against
his mother’s will, and saw the fairy, and went to the house
of the giant who had killed his father, and stole the hen that
laid the golden eggs, and did various other wonderful things,
till at last the giant came running after him and followed him
down the bean-stalk, but Jack was just in time to cut the
ladder through, and the wicked Giant tumbled down head first
into the well, and there he was drowned.
So runs the good old nursery tale of Jack and the Bean-
Stalk. That it is found m England and yet is not general in
the folk-lore of the rest of our race in Europe is remarkable.
Mr. Campbell says it is not known in the Highlands of Scot-
land, while in Germany Wilhelm Grimm only compares it with
two poor, dull little stories, one a version distinctly connected
with our English tale, the other perhaps so, but neither worth
repeating here.”
In another American tradition, found current among the
Mandans, the ascent is not from the earth to the sky, but from
the regions underground to the surtace. It is thus related in
* See also Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 547 ; part i. plate 52, p. 378.
? J. & W. Grimm, ‘ Marchen,’ vol. ii. p. 183; vol. iii. pp. 193, 321.
».
the account of Lewis and Clarke’s expedition. “ Their belief
in a future state is connected with this tradition of their origin :
the whole nation resided in one large village underground near
a subterraneous lake: a grape-vine extended its roots down to
their habitation and gave them a view of the hght: some of
the most adventurous climbed up the vine and were delighted
with the sight of the earth, which they found covered with
buffalo and rich with every kind of fruits: returning with the
grapes they had gathered, their countrymen were so pleased
with the taste of them that the whole nation resolved to leave
their dull residence for the charms of the upper region; men,
women, and children ascended by means of the vine; but when
about half the nation had reached the surface of the earth, a
corpulent woman who was clambering up the vine broke it with
her weight, and closed upon herself and the rest of the nation
the light of the sun. Those who were left on earth made a
village below where we saw the nine villages; and when the
Mandans die they expect to return to the original seats of their
forefathers ; the good reaching the ancient village by means of
the lake, which the burden of the sins of the wicked will not
enable them to cross.”?!
The set of Malayo-Polynesian stories which tell of the climb-
ing from earth to heaven by atree or vine-like plant is, besides,
a good illustration of the unity of the Island Mythology from
Borneo to New Zealand. The Dayak tale of the man who went
up to heaven and brought down rice has been already cited. It
is thus told by Mr. St. John :—* Once upon a time, when man-
kind had nothing to eat but a species of edible fungus that
grows upon rotting trees, and there were no cereals to gladden
and strengthen man’s heart, a party of Dayaks, among whom
was a man named Si Jura, whose descendants live to this day
in the Dayak village of Simpok, went forth to sea. They sailed
on for some time, until they came to a place at which they
heard the distant roar of a large whirlpool, and, to their amaze-
ment, saw before them a huge fruit-tree rooted in the sky, and
thence hanging down with its branches touching the waves. At
the request of his companions, Si Jura climbed among its boughs
1 Lewis & Clarke, p. 139. Catlin, vol.i. p.178. See Loskiel, p. 31.
to collect the fruit which was in abundance, and when he was
there he found himself tempted to ascend the trunk and find
out how the tree grew in that position. He did so, and at
length got so high that his companions in the boat lost sight
of him, and after waiting a certain time cooily sailed away
loaded with fruit. Looking down from his lofty position, Si
Jura saw his friends making off, so he had no other resource
but to go on climbing in hopes of reaching some resting-place.
He therefore persevered climbing higher and higher, till he
reached the roots of the tree, and there he found himself in a
new country—that of the Pleiades. There he met a being in
form of a man, named Si Kira, who took him to his home and
hospitably entertained him. The food offered was a mess of
soft white grains—boiled rice. ‘ Hat,’ said Si Kira. ‘ What,
those little maggots ?? replied Si Jura. ‘They are not mag-
gots, but boiled rice ;? and Si Kira forthwith explained the
process of planting, weeding, and reaping, and of pounding
and boiling rice... . So Si Jura made a hearty meal, and
after eating, Si Kira gave him seed of three kinds of rice, in-
structed him how to cut down the forest, burn, plant, weed,
and reap, take omens from birds, and celebrate harvest feasts ;
and then, by a long rope, let him down to earth again near his
father’s house.”
In the Malay island of Celebes a story is found which con-
tains the episode of the heaven-plant, but in a different con-
nexion. It is indeed a legend of no common interest, as bring-
ing the old European story of the Swan-coat* together with an
equally unmistakable version of a tale found also among the
natives of New Zealand. Seven heavenly nymphs came down
from the sky to bathe, and they were seen by Kasimbaha, who
thought first that they were white doves, but in the bath he
saw that they were women. Then he stole one of the thin
1 St. John, vol. i. p. 202.
* Among a number of instances, in the Vélundarqvitha, three women sit on
the shore with their swan-coats beside them, ready to turn into swans and fly
away. Or three doves fly down to a fountain and become maidens when they
touch the earth. Wielant takes their clothes and will not give them back till one
consents to be his wife, ete. etc. Grimm, D.M., pp. 398-402.
robes that gave the nymphs their power of flying, and so he
caught Utahagi, the one whose robe he had stolen, and took
her for his wife, and she bore him ason. Now she was called
Utahagi from a single white hair she had, which was endowed
with magic power, and this hair her husband pulled out. As
soon as he had done it, there arose a great storm, and Utahagi
went up into heaven. The child cried for its mother, and
Kasimbaha was in great grief, and cast about how he should
follow Utahagi up into the sky. Then a rat gnawed the thorns
off the rattans, and he clambered up by them with his son upon
his back till he came to heaven. There a little bird showed
him the house of Utahagi, and after various adventures he took
up his abode among the gods.
From Celebes to New Zealand the distance is some four
thousand miles, but among the Maoris a tale is found which is
beyond doubt of common origin with this. There was once a
great chief called Tawhaki, and a girl of the heavenly race,
whose name was Tango-tango, heard of his valour and his
beauty and came down to earth to be his wife, and she bore a
daughter to him. But when Tawhaki took the little girl to a
spring and had washed it, he held it out at arm’s length and
said, “ Faugh, how badly the little thing smells.” When
Tango-tango heard this, she was bitterly offended and began
to sob and weep, and at last she took the child and flew up to
heaven with it. Tawhaki tried to stop her and besought her
to stay, but in vain, and as she paused for a minute with one
foot resting on the carved figure at the end of the ridge-pole
of the house, above the door, he called to her to leave him
some remembrance of her. Then she told him that he was
not to lay hold of the loose root of the creeper, which dropping
from aloft sways to and fro in the air, but rather to lay fast
hold on that which hanging down from on high has again
struck its fibres into the earth. So she floated up into the air
and vanished, and Tawhaki remained mourning: at the end
of a month he could bear it no longer, so he took his younger
brother with him, and two slaves, and started to look for his
1 Schirren, p. 126. Compare Bornean story, Bp. of Labuan in Tr. Eth. Soc.,
1863, p. 27.
wife and child. At last the brothers came to the spot where
the ends of the tendrils which hung down from heaven reached
the earth, and there they found an old ancestress of theirs,
whose name was Matakerepo. She was appointed to take
care of the tendrils, and she sat at the place where they touched
the earth and held the ends of one of them in her hands. So
next day the younger brother, Karihi, started to climb up, and
the old woman warned him not to look down when he was
midway between heaven and earth, lest he should turn giddy
and fall, and also to take care not to catch hold of a loose ten-
dril. But just at that very moment he made a spring at the
tendrils, and by mistake caught hold of a loose one, and away
he swung to the very edge of the horizon, but a blast of wind
blew forth from thence and drove him back to the other side
of the skies, and then another gust swept him heavenwards,
and again he was blown down. Just as he reached the ground
this time Tawhaki shouted to him to let go, and lo, he stood
upon the earth once more, and the two brothers wept over his
narrow escape from destruction. Then Tawhaki began to
climb, and he went up and up, repeating a powerful incantation
as he climbed, till at last he reached the heavens, and there he
found his wife and their daughter, and they took her to the
water and baptized her in proper New Zealand fashion. Light-
ning flashed from Tawhaki’s armpits, and he still dwells up
there in heaven, and when he walks, his footsteps make the
thunder and lightning that are heard and seen on earth.!
There are other mythological ways beside the Heaven-tree,
by which, in different parts of the world, it is possible to go
1 Grey, ‘ Polynesian Mythology,’ p. 66, etc. Several incidents are here omitted.
In another version Tawhaki goes up not by the creeper but upon a spider’s web.
(Thomson, N. Z., vol. i. p. 111. Yate, p. 144.) Other stories connected with this
series are to be found in the Samoan group. The taro, like the rice in Borneo, is
brought down from heaven; there was a heaven-tree, where people went up and
down, and when it fell it stretched some sixty miles ; two young men went up to
the moon, one by a tree, the other on the smoke of a fire as it towered into the sky
(Turner, p. 246). In the Caroline Islands, another of these karvoBara: goes up to
heaven on a column of smoke to visit his celestial father (J. R. Forster, Obs.
p- 606). In the Tonga Islands, Maui makes the toa grow up to heayen, so that the
god Etumatubua can come down by it (Schirren, p. 76).
up and down between the surface of the ground and the sky
or the regions below; the rank spear-grass, a rope or thong,
a spider’s web, a ladder of iron or gold, a column of smoke, or
the rainbow. It must be remembered in discussing such tales,
that the idea of climbing, for instance, from earth to heaven
by a tree, fantastic as it may seem to a civilized man of mo-
dern times, is in a different grade of culture quite a simple and
natural idea, and too much stress must not be laid on bare
coincidences to this effect in proving a common origin for the
stories which contain them, unless closer evidence is forth-
coming. Such tales belong to a rude and primitive state of
knowledge of the earth’s surface, and what lies above and be-
low it. The earth is a flat plain surrounded by the sea, and
the sky forms a roof on which the sun, moon, and stars travel.
The Polynesians, who thought, hke so many other peoples,
ancient and modern, that the sky descended at the horizon
and enclosed the earth, still call foreigners papalangi, or
“‘heaven-bursters,” as having broken in from another world
outside. The sky is to most savages what it is called in a
South American language, mumeseke, that is, the ‘ earth on
high.”! There are holes or windows through this roof or fir-
mament, where the rain comes through, and if you climb high
enough you can get through and visit the dwellers above, who
look, and talk, and live very much in the same way as the
people upon earth. As above the flat earth, so below it, there
are regions inhabited by men or man-like creatures, who some-
times come up to the surface, and sometimes are visited by the
inhabitants of the upper earth. We live as it were upon the
ground floor of a great house, with upper storeys rising one
over another above us, and cellars down below.
The Bridge of the Dead is one of the well-marked myths of
the Old World. Over the midst of the Moslem hell stretches
the bridge Es-Sirat, finer than a hair, and sharper than the
edge of a sword. There all souls of the dead must pass along,
but while the good reach the other side in safety, the wicked
fall off into the abyss. The Jews, too, have their bridge of
hell, narrow as a thread, but it is only the souls of the unbe-
1 Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. ii. p. 276.
lievers who have to pass there. “ The brig of dread, no brader
than a thread,” is in an old English wake-song from the
North Country, and the bridge where the disembodied souls
of the dead pass the river Gjéll is part and parcel of the story
of Balder, in the Prose Edda.! At this day, the Karens of
Burmah tie strings across the rivers to serve as bridges for the
ghosts of the dead to pass over to their graves.? Unhke
the last two stories, the Heaven-Bridge does not seem to be-
long to Polynesia, but then the South Sea Islanders have
little to do with bridges. In Java, however, it is found, but in
company with purely Indian matter, such as the Sapta Patala,
the seven regions of hell, so that it is likely that it is not a real
Malay belief, but came across from Asia. Batara Guru built a
wall of stone round Suralaya, the Dwelling of the Gods, and
round it he formed the Abyss Kawah, and set a bridge over it
to reach the single opening in the Wall of Heaven. Off this
bridge the evildoers fall into the depths below.?
In North America, the Bridge of the Dead forms part of the
Indian mythology. The Minnetarees, it is recorded in the ac-
count of Major Long’s expedition, which was published in 1823,
believe that, m their way to the mansions of their ancestors
after death, they have to cross a narrow footing over a rapid
river, where the good warriors and hunters pass, but the
worthless ones fall in. Catlin’s account of the Choctaw belief
is as follows :—“ Our people all believe that the spirit lives in
a future state; that it has a great distance to travel after death
towards the west—that it has to cross a dreadful deep and rapid
stream, which is hemmed in on both sides by high and rugged
hills—over this stream, from hill to hill, there lies a long and
slippery pine-log, with the bark peeled off, over which the dead
have to pass to the delightful hunting-grounds. On the other
side of the stream there are six persons of the good hunting-
grounds with rocks in their hands, which they throw at them
all when they are on the middle of the log. The good walk on
safely to the good hunting-grounds. . . . The wicked see the
stones coming, and try to dodge, by which they fall down from
- } Lane, vol. i. p. 95. Grimm, D. M., p. 794. See Bastian, vol. ii. p. 340.
° Mrs. Mason, p.73. * Schirren, pp. 122, 125. . 4 Long’s Exp., vol. i. p. 280.
the log, and go thousands of feet to the water, which is dash-
ing over the rocks.”! In the interior of South America the idea
appears again among the Manacicas. Among these people, the
Maponos or priests performed a kind of baptism of the dead,
and were then supposed to mount into the air, and carry the
soul to the Land of the Departed. After a weary journey of
many days over hills and vales, through forests, and across
rivers and swamps and lakes, they came io a place where
many roads met, near a deep and wide river, where the god
Tatusiso stood night and day upon a wooden bridge to inspect
all such travellers. If he did not consider the sprinkling after
death a sufficient purgation of the sins of the departed, he
would stop the priest, that the soul he carried might be fur-
ther cleansed, and if resistance were made, would sometimes
seize the unhappy soul and throw him into the river, and when
this happened some calamity would follow among the Manacicas
at home.’
The Bridge of the Dead may possibly have its origin in the
rainbow. Among the Northmen the rainbow is to be seen in the
bridge Bifrést of the three colours, over which the Adsir make
their daily journey, and the red in it is fire, for were it easy to
pass over, the Frost-giants and the Mountain-giants would get
across it into heaven. In a remark, evidently belonging to the
North American story of the Sun-Catcher, the rainbow replaces
the tree up which the mouse climbs, and gnaws loose a captive
in the sky.? The Milky Way, which among the North Ame-
rican Indians is the road of souls to the other world, has also a
claim to be considered.* As in the Old World, so in the New,
the Bridge of the Dead is but an incident, sometimes, but not
always or even mostly, introduced into a wider belief that after
death the soul of man comes to a great gulf or stream, which it
has to pass to reach the country that lies beyond the grave.
The Mythology of Polynesia, though it wants the Bridge, deve-
lopes the idea of the gulf which the souls have to pass, in canoes
1 Catlin, vol. ii. p. 127.
2 Southey, ‘ Brazil,’ vol. iii. p. 186
* Schoolcraft in Pott, ‘Ungleichheit der Menschlichen Rassen ;’ Lemgo, 1856,
p- 267. 4 Le Jeune (1634), p. 63.
or by swimming, into a long series of myths. It is not needful
to enter here into details of so well-known a feature of the
Mythology of the Old World, where Charon and his boat, the
procession of the dead by water to their long home, in modern
Brittany as in ancient Hgypt, the setting afloat of the Scandi-
nayian heroes in burning ships, or burying them in boats on
shore, are all instances of its prevalence. In North America
we hear sometimes of the bridge, but sometimes the water
must be passed in canoes. The souls come to a great lake
where there is a beautiful island, toward which they have to
paddle in a canoe of white shining stone. On the way there
arises a storm, and the wicked souls are wrecked, and the
heaps of their bones are to be seen under water, but the good
reach the happy island.? So Charlevoix speaks of the souls
that are shipwrecked in crossing the river which they have to
pass on their long journey toward the west,’ and with this be-
lief the canoe-burial of the North-West and of Patagonia hangs
together. How the souls of the Ojibwas cross the deep and
rapid water to reach the land of bliss,* and the souls of the
Mandans travel on the lake by which the good reach their an-
cient village, while the wicked cannot get across for the bur-
den of their sins,> Ido not know; but, like the Heaven-Bridge,
the Heaven-Gulf which has to be passed on the way to the
Land of Spirits, has a claim to careful discussion in the general
argument for the proof of historical connexion from Analogy
of Myths.
The Fountain of Youth is known to the Mythology of India.
The Acvinas let the husband of Sukanyd go into the lake,
whence the bather comes forth as old or as young as he may
choose ; aud elsewhere the “ ageless river,” vijard nadi, makes
the old young again by only seeing it, or perhaps by bathing
in its waters.6 Perhaps it is this fountain that Sir John Maun-
devile hears of early in the fourteenth century somewhere about
India. “ Also toward the heed of that Forest, is the Cytee of
1 Williams, ‘ Fiji,’ vol. i. pp. 244, 205. Schirren, pp. 93, 110, ete.
2 Schooleraft, part i. p. 321. Mackenzie, p. cxix.
3 Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 76. 4 Schooleraft, part ii. p. 135.
5 Lewis & Clarke, p. 139. § Kuhn, pp. 128, 12.
Polombe. And above the Cytee is a grete Mountayne, that
also is clept Polombe ; and of that Mount the Cytee hathe his
name, And at the Foot of that Mount, is a fayr Welle and a
gret, that hathe odour and savour of alle Spices ; and at every
hour of the day, he chaungethe his odour and his savour
dyversely. And whoso drynkethe 8 tymes fasting of that
Watre of that Welle, he is hool of alle maner sykenesse, that
he hathe. And thei that dwellen there and drynken often of
that Welle, thei nevere han Sekenesse, and thei semen alle ways
5jonge. I have dronken there of 3 or 4 sithes; and 5it, me-
thinkethe, I fare the better. Sum men clepen it the Welle of
30uthe: for thei that often drynken there of, semen alle weys
5o0ngly, and lyven with outen Sykenesse. And men seyn, that
that Welle cometh out of Paradys: and therfore it is so ver-
tuous.””!
When Cambyses sent the Fish-Haters to spy out the condi-
tion of the long-lived Ethiopians, and the messengers won-
dered to hear that they lived a hundred and twenty years or
more, the Ethiopians took them to a fountain, where, when
they had bathed, their bodies shone as if they had been oiled,
and smelt like the scent of violets.2. In Europe, too, stories of
miraculously healing fountains have long been current.? The
Moslem geographer Ibn-el-Wardi places the Fountain of Life
in the dark south-western regions of the earth. El-Khidr
drank of it, and will live till the day of judgment; and Ilyas or
Elias, whom popular belief mixes not only with Hl-Khidr, but
also with St. George, the Dragon-slayer, has drunk of it lke-
wise. Farther east, the idea is to be found in the Malay
islands. Batara Guru drinks from a poisonous spring, but
-saves himself and the rest of the gods by finding a well of hfe ;
and again, Nurtjaja compels the pandit Kabib, the guardian of
the caverns below the earth, where flows the spring of immor-
tality, to let him drink of its waters, and even to take some for
his descendants. In the Hawaiian legend, Kamapukai, “ the
child who runs over the sea,” goes with forty companions to
1 ¢ The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt. ;? London, 1725, p. 204.
2 Herod., iii. c. 23. 3 Grimm, D.M., p. 554. Perty, p. 149.
4 Lane, ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ vol. i. p. 20. 5 Schirren, p. 124,
2A
Tahiti (Kahiki, that is to say, to the land far away), and brings
back wondrous tales of Haupokane, “ the belly of Kane,” and
of the wai ora, waiola, “ water of life,” or wai ora roa, “ water
of enduring life,’ which removes all sickness, deformity, and
decrepitude from those who plunge beneath its waters.’ It is
perhaps to this story of the Sandwich Islands that ‘Turner re-
fers, when he says that some South Sea islanders have tradi-
tions of a river in the spirit-world called “ Water of Life,”
which makes the old young again, and they return to earth to
live another life.?
One easy explanation of the Fountain of Youth suggests it-
self at the first glance. Every islander who can see the sun go
down old, faint, and weary into the western sea, to rise young
and fresh from the waters, has the Fountain of Youth before
him; and this explanation of several, at least, of the stories is
strenethened by their details, as when the fountain is described
as flowing in the regions below, or in the belly of Kane, where
the boy who climbs over the sea goes to it; or when, like the
dying and reviving sun, Batara Guru is poisoned, but finds the
reviving water and is cured ;? or when the Moslem associates
the drinking from the fountain with Hljah of the chariot of
fire and horses of fire; or with St. George, the favourite me-
dizeval bearer of the great Sun-myth. But, as these stories are
not brought forward for the purpose of discussing their origin,
but comparing with them a corresponding myth found across
the Atlantic, it may suffice here to give the particulars of the
story found current in the West Indies early in the sixteenth
century. Gomara relates that Juan Ponce de Leon, having
his government taken from him, and thus finding himself rich
and without charge, fitted out two caravels, and went to seek
for the island of Boyuca, where the Indians said there was the
fountain that turned old men back into youths (a perennial
spring, says Peter Martyr, so noble that the drinking of its
waters made old men young again). For six months he went
1 Schirren, p. 80. Ellis, Polyn. Res., vol. ii. p. 47. Ellis, ‘ Hawaii ;’ London,
1827, p. 399. 2 Turner, p. 353.
3 For etym. etc. of Batara Guru, see W.v. Humboldt, Kawi-Spr., vol. i. p. 100;
Schirren, p. 116; also Crawfurd, Introd., p. exviii. and s. vv. batara, guru.
GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF MYTHS.
lost and famishing among many islands, but of such a fountain
he found no trace. Then he came to Bimini, and discovered
Florida on Pascua Florida, (Haster Sunday), wherefrom he
gave the country its name.!
To proceed now to the story of the Tail-Fisher. Dr. Dasent,
who, in his admirable Introduction to the Norse Tales, has
taken the lead in the extension of the argument from Compa-
rative Mythology beyond the limited range within which it is
aided by History and Language, has brought the popular tales
of Africa and Europe into close connexion by adducing, among
others, the unmistakable common origin of the Norse tale of
the Bear who, at the instigation of the Fox, fishes with his tail
through a hole in the ice till it is frozen in, and then pulls at it
till it comes off, and the story from Bornu of the Hyena who
puts his tail mto the hole, that the Weasel may fasten the
meat to it, but the Weasel fastens a stick to it instead, and the
Hyeena pulls till his tail breaks ; both stories accounting in a
similar way, but with a proper difference of local colouring, for
the fact that bears and hyzenas are stumpy-tailed.?
A similar story is told in Reynard the Fox, less appositely,
of the Wolf instead of the Bear,® and in the Celtic story re-
cently published by Mr. Campbell, it 1s again the Wolf who
loses his tail. In this latter story, by that kaleidoscopic ar-
rangement of incidents which is so striking a feature of My-
thology, the losing of the tail is combined with the episode of
taking the reflection of the moon for a cheese, which occurs in
another connexion in Reynard,‘ and is apparently the origin
of our popular saying about the moon being made of green
cheese.
‘He made an instrument to know
If the moon shine at full or no ;
That would, as soon as e’er she shone, straight
Whether ’twere day or night demonstrate ;
1 Gomara, Hist. Gen. de las Indias; Medina del Campo, 1558, part i. fol. xxiii.
Petri Martyri De Orbe Novo (1516), ed. Hakluyt; Paris, 1587, dee. ii. c. 10,
Galvano, p. 123.
_ ? Dasent, ‘Popular Tales from the Norse ;’ (2nd ed.) Edinburgh, 1859, pp. 1.
197. 3 Grimm, ‘ Reinhart Fuchs,’ pp. civ. exxii. 51. 4 Td. p. exxvii.
2a 2
Tell what her d’ameter to an inch is,
And prove that she’s not made of green cheese.”
. ,
Here, of course, “green cheese”? means, like tupos yA@pos,
=) af o)
fresh, white cheese. In the Highland tale the Fox shows the
Wolf the moon on the ice, and tells him it is a cheese, and he
must cover it with his tail to hide it, till the Fox goes to see
that the farmer is asleep. When the tail is frozen tight the
Fox alarms the farmer, and the Wolf leaves his tail behind
him.”
“The tailless condition both of the bear and the hyzna,”
Dr. Dasent remarks, “ could scarcely fail to attract attention in
a race of hunters, and we might expect that popular tradition
would attempt to account for both.” The reasonableness of
this conjecture is well shown in the case of two other short-
tailed beasts, in a mythical episode from Central America,
which bears no appearance of being historically connected
with the rest, but looks as though it had been devised inde-
pendently to account for the facts. When the two princes
Hunahpu and Xbalanqué set themselves one day to till the
ground, the axe cut down the trees and the mattock cleared
away the underwood, while the masters amused themselves
with shooting. But next day, when they came back, they
found the trees and creepers and brambles back in their
places. So they cleared the ground again, and hid themselves
to watch, and at midnight all the beasts came, small and great,
saying in their language “ Trees, arise; creepers, arise!” and
they came close to the two princes. First came the Lion and
the Tiger, and the princes tried to catch them, but could not.
Then came the Stag and the Rabbit, and them they caught by
their tails, but the tails came off, and so the Stag and the Rab-
bit have still but “ scarce a stump” left them to this day. But
the Fox and the Jackal and the Boar and the Porcupine and
the other beasts passed by, and they could not catch one till
the Rat came leaping along ; he was the last and they got in
his way and caught him in a cloth, They pinched his head
1 «Hudibras,’ part ii. canto iii.
2 Campbell, ‘Popular Tales of the West Highlands ;’ Edinburgh, 1860, vol. i.
p- 272.
and tried to choke him, and burnt his tail over the fire, and
since then the rat has had a hairless tail, and his eyes are as
if they had been squeezed out of his head. But he begged to
be heard, and told them that it was not their business to till
the ground, for the rings and gloves and the india-rubber
ball, the instruments of the princely game, were hidden in their
grandmother’s house, and so forth.!
The curious mythic art of Tail-fishing only forms a part of
the stories how the Bear, the Wolf, and the Hyzna came to
lose their tails in Europe and Africa. But this particular idea,
taken by itself, has a wide geographical range both in the
Old and New Worlds. A story current in India, apparently
among the Tamil population of the South, is told by the Rev.
J. Roberts, who says, speaking of the jackal, “ this animal is
very much like the fox of England in his habits and appearance.
I have been told, that they often catch the crab by putting
their tail into its hole, which the creature immediately seizes,
in hope of food: the jackal then drags it out and devours it.’’?
In North America, the bearer of the story is the racoon.
“Lawson relates, that those which formerly lived on the salt
waters in Carolina, fed on oysters, which they nimbly snatched
when the shell opened; but that sometimes the paw was
caught, and held till the return of the tide, in which the ani-
mal, though it swims well, was sometimes drowned. His art
in catching crabs is still more extraordinary. Standing on the
borders of the waters where this shell-fish abounds, he keeps
the end of his tail floating on the surface, which the crab seizes,
and he then leaps forward with his prey, and destroys it in a
very artful manner.”? In South America, the art is given to
two other very cunning creatures, the monkey and the jaguar.
I have been informed by one of the English explorers in British
Guiana, that it is a current story there, that the monkey catches
fish by letting them take hold of the end of his tail. Southey,
quoting from a manuscript description of the district flooded
by the River Paraguay, called the Lago Xarayes, says “‘ when
1 Brasseur, ‘ Popol-Vuh,’ pp. 118-25.
* Roberts, ‘ Oriental Illustrations,’ p. 172.
3 D. B..Warden, Account of U. 8. ; Edinburgh, 1819, vol. i..p. 199.
the floods are out the fish leave the river to feed upon certain
fruits: as soon as they hear or feel the fruit strike the water,
they leap to catch it as it rises to the surface, and in their eager-
ness spring into the air. From this habit the Ounce has learnt
a curious stratagem; he gets upon a projecting bough, and
from time to time strikes the water with his tail, thus imitating
the sound which the fruit makes as it drops, and as the fish
spring towards it, he catches them with his paw.” More
recently, the story has been told again by Mr. Wallace; “The
jaguar, say the Indians, is the most cunning animal in the
forest: he can imitate the voice of almost every bird and ani-
mal so exactly, as to draw them towards him: he fishes in the
rivers, lashing the water with his tail to imitate falling fruit,
and when the fish approach, hooks them up with his claws.’”?
It may be objected against the use of the tail-fishing story
as mythological evidence, that there may possibly be some
foundation for it in actual fact ; and it is indeed hardly more
astonishing, for instance, than the jaguar’s turning a number
of river-turtles on their backs to be eaten at his leisure, a
story which Humboldt accepts as true. But the way in which
the tail-fishing is attributed in different countries to one ani-
mal after another, the bear, the wolf, the hyzena, the jackal, the
racoon, the monkey, and the jaguar, authorizes the opinion
that, in most cases at least, it is one of those floating ideas
which are taken up as part of the story-teller’s stock in trade,
and used where it suits him, but with no particular subordina-
tion to fact.
Lastly, another Old World story which has a remarkable
analogue in South America is that of the Diable Boiteux.
This, however, in the state in which it is known to modern
Europe, is a conception a good deal modified under Christian
influences. In the old mythology of our race, it is the Fire-
god who is lame. The unsteady flickering of the flames may
perhaps be figured in the crooked legs and hobbling gait of
Hephestus, and Zeus casts him down from heaven to earth
like his crooked lightnings ; while the stories which correspond
with the Vulcan-myth on German ground tell of the laming of
1 Southey, vol. i. p. 142. 2 Wallace, p. 455.
Wieland, our Wayland Smith, the representative of Hephzestus.
The transfer of the lameness of the Fire-god to the Devil seems
to belong to the mixture of the Scriptural Satan with the ideas
of heathen gods, elves, giants, and demons, which go to form
that strange compound, the Devil of popular medizeval belief.
There is something very quaint in the notion of a lame god
or devil, but it is quite a familiar one in South Africa. The
deity of the Namaquas and other tribes is Tsui’kuap, whose
principal attributes seem to be the causing of pain and death.
This being received a wound in his knee in a great fight, and
““Wounded-knee” appears to be the meaning of his name.?
Moffat’s account, which is indeed not very clear, fits with a late
remark made by Livingstone among another people of South
Africa, the Bakwains. He observes that near the village of
Sechele there is a cave called Lepelole, which no one dared
to enter, for it was the common belief that it was the habita-
tion of the Deity, and that no one who went m ever came out
again. “‘ltis curious,” he says, ‘ that in all their pretended
dreams or visions of their god he has always a crooked leg,
like the Egyptian Thau.””? Kyven in Australia something similar
is to be found. The Biam is held to be like a black, but de-
formed in his lower extremities, the natives say they got many
of the songs sung at their dances from him, but he also causes
diseases, especially one which marks the face like small-pox.*
The Diable Boiteux of South America is thus described by
Poppig, in his account of the life of the forest Indians of Mainas.
“A ghostly being, the Uchuclla-chaqui or Lame-foot, alone
troubles the source of his best pleasure and his livelihood.
Where the forest is darkest, where only the light-avoiding
amphibia and the nocturnal birds dwell, lives this dangerous
creature, and endeavours, by putting on some friendly shape, to
lure the Indian to his destruction. As the sociable hunters do,
1 Welcker, ‘ Griechische Gétterlehre ;? Gottingen, 1857, ete., vol. i. pp. 661-5.
Grimm, D. M., pp. 221, 351, 937-8, 944, 963. See Schirren, p. 164.
2 Moffat, pp. 257-9.
3 Livingstone, p. 124. He means, I presume, Pthah, or rather Pthah-Sokari
Osiris.
4 Eyre, vol. ii. p. 362.
it gives the well understood signs, and, never reached itself,
entices the deluded victim deeper and deeper into the solitude,
disappearing with a shout of mocking laughter when the path
home is lost, and the terrors of the wilderness are increasing
with the growing shadows of night. Sometimes it separates
companions who have gone hunting together, by appearing
first in one place, then in another in an altered form; but it
never can deceive the wary hunter who in distrust examines
the footsteps of his enemy. Hardly has he caught sight of the
quite unequal size of the impressions of the feet, when he
hastens back, and for long after no one dares to make an ex-
pedition into the wilderness, for the visits of the fiend are only
”1 Tn South America as in Africa this is not a mere
local tale, but a widely spread belief.
In conclusion, the analogies between the Mythology of
America and. of the rest of the world which have been here
enumerated, when taken together with the many more which
come into view in studying a wider range of native American
traditions, and after full allowance has been made for the possi-
bility of independent coincidences, seem to me to warrant the
expectation that it will not be long before the American My-
thology will have to be treated as embodying materials common
to other districts of the world, mixed no doubt with purely
native matter. Such a view would bring the early history of
America into definite connexion with that of other regions,
over a larger geographical range than that included in Hum-
boldt’s argument, and would bear with some force, though of
course but indirectly, on the problem of the origin and diffusion
of mankind.
for a time.
' Poppig, ‘Reise in Chile,’ ete. ; Leipzig, 1835, vol. ii. p. 358. Klemm, C. G.
vol. i. p. 276.
a a
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(or)
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