There is even a certain amount of evidence which tends to
prove that the memory of the huge animals of the quaternary
period has been preserved up to modern times in popular tra-
dition. It is but quite lately that the fact of man having lived
on the earth at the same time with the mammoth has become a
generally received opinion, though its probability has been seen
by a few far-sighted thinkers for many years past, and it had
been suggested long before the late discoveries in the Drift-beds,
that several traditions, found in different parts of the world, were
derived from actual memory of the remote time when various
great animals, generally thought to have died out before the
appearance of man upon the earth, were still alive. The subject
is hardly in a state to express a decided opinion upon, but the
evidence is worthy of the most careful attention.
1 Marsden, pp. 467, 474. See Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 39.
312 HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION.
Father Charlevoix, whose ' History of New France ' was pub-
lished 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.
