Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/376

366 local colouring, for the fact that bears and hyænas are stumpy-tailed.

A similar story is told in Reynard the Fox, less appositely, of the Wolf instead of the Bear, and in the Celtic story recently published by Mr. Campbell, it is again the Wolf who loses his tail. In this latter story, by that kaleidoscopic arrangement of incidents which is so striking a feature of Mythology, the losing of the tail is combined with the episode of taking the reflection of the moon for a cheese, which occurs in another connexion in Reynard, and is apparently the origin of our popular saying about the moon being made of green cheese.

Here, of course, "green cheese" means, like, fresh, white cheese. In the Highland tale the Fox shows the Wolf the moon on the ice, and tells him it is a cheese, and he must cover it with his tail to hide it, till the Fox goes to see that the farmer is asleep. When the tail is frozen tight the Fox alarms the farmer, and the Wolf leaves his tail behind him.

"The tailless condition both of the bear and the hyaena," Dr. Dasent remarks, " could scarcely fail to attract attention in a race of hunters, and we might expect that popular tradition would attempt to account for both." The reasonableness of this conjecture is well shown in the case of two other short-tailed beasts, in a mythical episode from Central America, which bears no appearance of being historically connected with the rest, but looks as though it had been devised independently to account for the facts. When the two princes Hunahpu and Xbalanqué set themselves one day to till the