speech in that country, for "Popinjays speak of their own. Nature and say 'Salve' to Men that go through the Deserts." Neither classical nor mediæval relators mention the device which has given a South African tribe its name, and rumors of which may have provided a basis for fable. Merolla, who went to the Congo in 1682, heard that the Hottentots "have not the gift of human voice, but understand each other by a sort of hissing tone and motion of the lips." This is the Hottentot "click" which the Portuguese called a kind of stammering and the Dutch likened to the turkey's gobble. It is made by apply. ing the tongue to the roof of the mouth, the teeth, or the gums, and suddenly drawing it back. There are four of these clicksthe dental, like the smack of a kiss; the palatal, like the tap of a woodpecker; the cerebral, like the pop of a cork; and the lateral, like the quack of a duck. The Dog-headed People The Amazon and pygmy, and certain tribes of the satyrs, had speech entirely human. Because in them credulity has won unlooked-for triumphs over skepticism, these three peoples, best known of the races of legend, are reserved for separate treatment later. The men of another race vie with the Amazons as figures in plastic art, although only in its more grotesque manifestations. The Cynocephali, or dog-headed people, writes Ctesias, are a swarthy and extremely just people living in the mountains of northern India at the sources of the Hyparkhos. The tribe numbers about one hundred and twenty thousand persons and pays tribute to the King of the Indians. These people have the heads of dogs, but with larger teeth, and the bodies of men; and they have dog claws. They cannot use human speech, although they understand it. They converse with one another by barking, and with other people by barking and the sign language. They practice no arts but live by the chase, using the bow and spear; and they can outrun wild animals. Their staple food is raw flesh, which, however, they roast in the sun. They rear numbers of sheep, goats, and asses and drink the milk and whey of the ewes. They are fond of the fruit of the siptakhora, the tree that produces amber. The surplus fruit they dry and pack in hampers as the Greeks pack raisins. Every year they freight rafts with the hampers and with two hundred and sixty talents weight of amber, and a like weight of a pigment which they make from a purple flower. This they convey as tribute to the Indian king. They ship other raft-loads of the same commodities to their neighbors, receiving bread and flour in return and a cloth made from a stuff grown on trees (cotton). They also sell arms to other peoples. The dog-headed people are troglodytes, sleeping on a litter of straw or leaves spread in caves. The women bathe once a month, the men not at all, merely washing their hands; but thrice a month they anoint themselves with butter. They are clad in skins and the richest have cotton raiment. Some of them live to be two hundred years old. The inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, says Marco Polo, are a savage race "having heads, eyes and teeth resembling those of the canine species"; and they kill and eat strangers. Odoric is equally uncomplimentary, but Ibn Batuta, always sensitive to female charm, says their naked wives are of exquisite beauty. Carpini speaks of India's dog-faced men. Even Greenland has a similar legend as to an older race of barbarians who had magic, but not the bow and arrow. These were men with dog paws. They disappeared in battle with the Eskimos, or from natural causes, since "the world was too small to hold both races." Myths of dog descent are found among the Aleuts, Dogribs, and Ojibwas in North America, as well as in Madagascar, Java, the Nicobars, New Guinea, Indo-China, and even Europe. In North America the wild dog (coyote) frequently figures as the creator of mankind. Sunamukha is the Indian name of the Cynocephali, and a manuscript of the Prabhâsakhanda recites that this people lives on the Indus. What Ctesias has set down seems to be an account of an actual race, a tribe of black aborigines. When Hayton, the intrepid traveler-king of Armenia, paid a visit in the thirteenth century to Batu, the Mongol prince, he brought back a related and still stranger story. Beyond Cathay, a journey of two years and two months from Nakin, was a country where the women had the human shape and speech, but the men were like hairy dogs and had no speech. These dog-men repelled all strangers from their land, and supported themselves and their wives by the chase, the men eating flesh raw, the women cooking it. When children were born, the males had the shape of dogs, the females that of women. The Chinese Encyclopedia also has a tale of the Kingdom of Dogs, and it was a Chinese traveler who broke up this curious commonwealth. The women wished to escape from it and gave him little sticks, asking him, when he went back to his native land, to drop one of these every ten li. They got away by the trail he marked. The One-Eyed Arimaspians Lying between the gold-guarding griffins and the cannibal Issedones was the country of the one-eyed Arimaspians. They first appear in a poem of Aristeas of Proconesus, a semi-mythical person who made a northward journey, as his verses declare, in a mood of "bacchic fury." Herodotus bases his account on these, but cannot persuade himself that there is a race of men born with one eye who in all else resemble the rest of mankind. Arimaspi, he says, is a word of Scythic origin, a compound of arima (one) and spou (eye). There Herodotus drops the legend, and after it has thriven in the tales of the fabulists for some thousands of years, modern criticism takes it up again from the same angle. It is suggested that, after all, Arimaspi never meant one-eyed, and that the race, the tradition of whose deformed aspect arose from a mistaken translation of its name, is still in existence in the Russian tribe known as the Tsheremis, which occupies the left bank of the Middle Volga. This is near enough to the Ural gold districts to meet the general topography of the legend. Strabo also describes a one-eyed nation, the Monomatti, with the ears of dogs, bristling hair, and shaggy breasts. Folk That Live on Odors The folk that live on odors dwell, says Megasthenes, near the sources of the Ganges. They have no mouths, hence their name of Astomi. Their bodies are rough and hairy and they clothe themselves with a down plucked from trees-silk or cotton. They use neither meat nor drink and subsist only by breathing and by inhaling scents. When they start on a long journey they lay in a supply of odoriferous roots, flowers, and apples. But, says Pliny, "an odor which is a little more powerful than usual easily destroys them." Pope's "die of a rose in aromatic pain" may define such a fate. According to other ancient writers the Astomi also supported life by sniffing at raw meat, and their susceptibility to rank smells made it hard to keep them alive in camp. In Ethiopia Pliny places a people that "have the mouth grown together, and being destitute of nostrils, breathe through one passage only, imbibing their drink through it by means of a hollow stalk of the oat, which there grows spontaneously and supplies them with its grain for food." Maundeville removes the Astomi to an island and gives them the stature of pygmies and a hissing speech. The Noseless Nations There were several noseless nations. The flexible-footed Scyritae, says Megasthenes, had only two breathing orifices above the mouth; and he sketches pygmies similarly made. Maundeville improves on the sketch: "And in another Ile be Folk that have the Face all flat, all plain, without Nose and without Mouth." In contrast still another island had "Folk of foul Fashion and Shape that have the lip above the Mouth so great that when they sleep in the Sun they cover all the Face with that lip." Megasthenes had named and described these seventeen centuries before. They were the Amycteres, with upper lips projecting far beyond the lower-an omnivorous people, fond of raw meat, and short lived. Tudela tells of desert-ranging, infidel Turks who worship the wind, eschew bread and cooked meats, and, lacking noses, breathe through two small holes. The Noseless People of the Eskimo shore are evil spirits that drag fishermen to gloomy abodes under the sea. To men with the bold Roman profile, the Levantine contour, or the scimitar-shaped visage of the Sephardic Jew, Tartary's small-nosed, flat-faced peoples would indeed present a countenance very like a plane surface. The scanty hair of the same peoples may be responsible for the ancient notion of bald northern nations. The Eskimo legend suggests a skeleton tenanted by a demon. Large-eared Races An Indian race called the Enotocoite had ears hanging down, to their feet-"great Ears and long that hang down to their Knees" is for once the more restrained phrase of Maundeville. The philosophers who had told Megasthenes of so many interesting folk told him also of these. They could sleep upon their ears as upon a rug, or under them as under a canopy, or inside them as in a sleeping bag. These appendages were like winnowing fans, Tzetzes puts it. Their owners were so strong they could pluck up trees. So could the elephant, which also has flapping ears and a prolonged upper lip-the pattern, it would seem, for at least two fables. Ctesias describes a people who could blanket the upper parts of their bodies with their ears. These were the Pandore, a mountain race who lived to be two hundred years old, yet were destined evidently to become extinct, for they numbered only thirty thousand persons and the women bore children but once. The infants were hoary-headed at birth, but at thirty the hair began to turn black, and at sixty no white hairs were left. Five thousand bowmen and spearmen of the tribe followed the Indian king. There was even a Scandinavian tribe with all-enveloping ears, if Pliny had it right. Headless Peoples The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads -SHAKESPEARE: Othello. To the west of the Troglodytes in distant mountains of Ind, says Ctesias, live tribesmen who are without necks and have eyes in their shoulders. In the north of Africa, says Pliny, are the Blemmyes who "are said to have no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their breasts." These were also called the Acephalites. Maundeville shifts their habitat. They occupy one of fifty-four great isles under the jurisdiction of the king of Dondun. This island is somewhere toward the south of Asia. In it dwell "Folk of foul Stature and of cursed Nature that have no Heads. And their Eyes be in their Shoulders, and their Mouths be round shapen, like an Horse-shoe amidst their |