Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/328

318 The ancient book Shin-y-King speaks of this animal in the following terms:—There is in the extreme north, among the snows and ice which cover this region, a shu (rat), which weighs up to a thousand pounds, its flesh is very good for those who are heated. The Tse-shu calls it fen-shu, and speaks of another kind which is of less size; it is only, says this authority, as large as a buffalo, it burrows like the moles, shuns the light, and almost always stays in its underground caves. It is said that it would die if it saw the light of the sun, or even of the moon."

The story of the mammoth being a burrowing animal, which has arisen from the finding its remains exposed in cliffs or banks deep below the surface, becomes the more valuable as evidence of the growth of myths, from the fact that on the other side of the world a like story has developed itself from a like origin. When Darwin visited certain cliffs of the river Parana, between Buenos Ayres and Santa Fe, where many bones of Mastodons are found, he says, "The men who took me in the canoe, said they had long known of these skeletons, and had often wondered how they had got there: the necessity of a theory being felt, they came to the conclusion that, like the bizcacha, the mastodon was formerly a burrowing animal." The bizcacha is a small rabbit-like rodent, common on the Pampas.

Other fossil remains beside those of the mammoth have given rise to myths of observation in Siberia. The curved tusks of the Rhinoceros tichorhinus are something like the claws of a monstrous bird, and when both tusks are found united by part of the skull, the whole might very well be taken by a man totally ignorant of anatomy, for the bird's foot with two claws. The Siberians not only believe the horns of the rhinoceros to be the claws of an enormous bird, and call them "birds' claws" accordingly, but a family of myths has developed itself out of this belief, how these winged monsters lived in the country in the time of the ancestors of the present inhabitants, who fought with them for the possession of the land. One story tells how the country was wasted by one of them, till a wise man fixed a pointed