Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/324

314 and children, and sometimes comes down to the roças to steal the mandioca." Similar to, or the same as this being, is the Caypór, whom the Indians, in their masquerades, represent us a bulky, misshapen monster, with red skin and long shaggy red hair, hanging hallway 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 evidence, thought by him to bear on the preservation of the memory of extinct creatures, adding to Father Charlevoix's great Elk, and the Père aux Bœufs from Buffon, a North American "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 inference 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.

A good example of a Myth of Observation is a story current