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 "Père aux Bœufs," 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."[2] There are current among the Iroquois, says Morgan, fables of a buffalo of such huge dimensions as to thresh down the forest in his march.[3] 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 like a mountain." The whole story, which goes on to tell how it came 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 explained 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 examination of caves
- ↑ Buffon, Hist. Nat. (ed. Sonnini), vol. xxviii. p. 264.
- ↑ Le Jeune, Relations (1634), vol. i. p. 46. A remarkable resemblance appears in the description of the Slavonic Buyán, the ocean-island of the blest, where are to be found the Snake older than all snakes, the prophetic Raven, elder brother of all ravens, the Bird, largest and oldest of all birds, with iron beak and copper claws, and the Mother of Bees, eldest among bees; Ralston, 'Songs of the Russian People,' p. 375. [Note to 3rd Edition.]
- ↑ Morgan, p. 166.
