To take another instance. The Hindoos had a fanciful notion that the world was supported by an elephant, and the elephant by a tortoise. Nothing can be imagined more incongruous and grotesque. Yet Dr Falconer has recently discovered, in his explorations in India, a fossil tortoise adequate to the support of an elephant. The incongruity then of the tradition disappears; its grotesqueness remains. I cannot help thinking, however, that it may have been the embodiment in symbol, or else the systematisation of the confused medley of their tradition of the order, _i.e. of the sequence of days of the creation_ (_vide_ Appendix to this chapter).[116] [116] This fable of the tortoise is also among the Mandans, whom, Catlin (_supra_, 135) says, had no other tradition of the Creation than that they were created under the ground. Their tradition is confused with the Deluge, which dominates in their tradition. "The Mandans believed that the earth rests on four tortoises. They say that "each tortoise rained ten days, making forty days in all, and the waters covered the earth" (_vide_ "O-kea-pa," p. 39, _infra_, ch. xi.) Does not this tradition of the tortoise decide the _Oriental_ origin of the North American Mandans? Falconer's "Palæontological Mem.," 1868, i. 297, ii. 377-573, &c., "As the pterodactyle more than realised the most extravagant idea of the winged dragon, so does this huge tortoise come up to the lofty conceptions of Hindoo mythology; and could we but recall the monsters to life, it were not difficult to imagine an elephant supported on its back"(i. 27). The New Zealanders have a curious tradition of their ancestors having encountered a gigantic saurian species of reptile, which must have been before they arrived in New Zealand. _Vide_ Shortland's "Traditions of the New Zealanders," p. 73. I have alluded, p. 199, to the tradition preserved by Berosus, that Oannes, whom I identify with Noah, left writings upon the origin of the world, in which he says, "that there was a time when all was darkness and water, and that this darkness and water contained _monstrous animals_." Here, perhaps, two distinct traditions are confused; but is not the tradition of animals so much out of the ordinary nature of things as to be called monstrous sufficiently marked to make us ask if the discovery of the skeleton of the "megatherium" ought to have come upon the scientific world as a surprise? Might they not have anticipated the discovery if they had duly trusted tradition?