like beasts. To people who at once believe monkeys a kind of savages, and savages a kind of monkeys, men with tails are creatures coming under both definitions. Thus the Homo caudatus, or satyr, often appears in popular belief as a half-human creature, while even in old-fashioned works on natural history he may be found depicted on the evident model of an anthropoid ape. In East Africa, the imagined tribe of long-tailed men are also monkey-faced,[1] while in South America the coata tapuya, or 'monkey-men,' are as naturally described as men with tails.[2] European travellers have tried to rationalize the stories of tailed men which they meet with in Africa and the East. Thus Dr. Krapf points to a leather appendage worn behind from the girdle by the Wakamba, and remarks, 'It is no wonder that people say there are men with tails in the interior of Africa,' and other writers have called attention to hanging mats or waist-cloths, fly-flappers or artificial tails worn for ornament, as having made their wearers liable to be mistaken at a distance for tailed men.[3] But these apparently silly myths have often a real ethnological significance, deeper at any rate than such a trivial blunder. When an ethnologist meets in any district with the story of tailed men, he ought to look for a despised tribe of aborigines, outcasts, or heretics, living near or among a dominant population, who look upon them as beasts, and furnish them with tails accordingly. Although the aboriginal Miau-tsze, or 'children of the soil,' come down from time to time into Canton to trade, the Chinese still firmly believe them to have short tails like monkeys;[4] the half-civilized Malays describe the ruder forest tribes as tailed men;[5] the Moslem nations of Africa tell the same story of the Niam-
- ↑ Petherick, 'Egypt, &c.' p. 367.
- ↑ Southey, 'Brazil,' vol. i. p. 685; Martius, vol. i. pp. 425, 633.
- ↑ Krapf, p. 142; Baker, 'Albert Nyanza,' vol. i. p. 83; St. John, vol. i. pp. 51, 405; and others.
- ↑ Lockhart, 'Abor. of China,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 181.
- ↑ 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 358; vol. iv. p. 374; Cameron, 'Malayan India,' p. 120; Marsden, p. 7; Antonio Galvano, pp. 120, 218.
