Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/322

312 Father Charlevoix, whose 'History of New France' was published 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 any- thing 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 imagine 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 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 the Mexican picture-writings. It represents a masked priest sacrificing a human victim, and Humboldt copies it in the 'Vues des Cordillères' 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 resemblance 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 sacrificer's mask the trunk of an elephant or some pachyderm resembling 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 is a 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