Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/126

116 solid rock at Tlanepantla the mark of hand and foot left by the mighty Quetzalcoatl.

There are three kinds of prints in the rock which may have served as a foundation for such tales as these. In many parts of the world there are fossil footprints of birds and beasts, many of huge size. The North American Indians also, whose attention is specially alive to the footprints of men and animals, very often carve them on rocks, sometimes with figures of the animals to which they belong. These footprints are sometimes so naturally done as to be mistaken for real ones. The rock of which Andersson heard in South Africa, "in which the tracks of all the different animals indigenous to the country are distinctly visible," is probably such a sculptured rock. Thirdly, there are such mere shapeless holes as those to which most or all of the Old World myths seem to be attached. Now the difficulty in working out the problem of the origin of these myths is this, that if the prints are real fossil ones, or good sculptures, stories of the beings that made them might grow up independently anywhere; but one can hardly fancy men in many different places coming separately upon the quaint notion of mere hollows, six feet long, being monstrous footprints, unless the notion of monstrous footprints being found elsewhere were already current. At the foot of the page are references to some passages relating to the subject.

It has just been remarked that there is a certain process of the human mind through which, among men at a low level of education, the use of images leads to gross superstition and delusion. No one will deny that there is an evident connexion between an object, and an image or picture of it; but we civilized men know well that this connexion is only subjective, that is, in the mind of the observer, while there is no objective connexion between them. By an objective connexion, I mean