ddle of the sea, one of them being
large, the other small; the latter is quite uninhabited. The large one
measures seventy _li_ in circuit. The natives on it are of a colour
resembling black lacquer; they eat men alive, so that sailors dare not
anchor on this coast.

"This island does not contain so much as an inch of iron, for which reason
the natives use (bits of) conch-shell (ch'oe-k'ue) with ground edges
instead of knives. On this island is a sacred relic, (the so-called)
'Corpse on a bed of rolling gold....'" (CHAU JU-KWA, p. 147.)

XIII., p. 311.

DOG-HEADED BARBARIANS.

Rockhill in a note to Carpini (_Rubruck_, p. 36) mentions "the Chinese
annals of the sixth century (_Liang Shu_, bk. 54; _Nan shih_, bk. 79)
which tell of a kingdom of dogs (_Kou kuo_) in some remote corner of
north-eastern Asia. The men had human bodies but dogs' heads, and their
speech sounded like barking. The women were like the rest of their sex in
other parts of the world."

Dr. Laufer writes to me: "A clear distinction must be made between
dog-headed people and the motive of descent from a dog-ancestor,--two
entirely different conceptions. The best exposition of the subject of the
cynocephali according to the traditions of the Ancients is now presented by
J. MARQUART (_Benin-Sammlung des Reichsmuseums in Leiden_, pp. cc-ccxix).
It is essential to recognize that the mediaeval European, Arabic, and
Chinese fables about the country of the dog-heads are all derived from one
common source, which is traceable to the Greek Romance of Alexander; that
is an Oriental-Hellenistic cycle. In a wider sense, the dog-heads belong to
the cycle of wondrous peoples, which assumed shape among the Greek mariners
under the influence of Indian and West-Asiatic ideas. The tradition of the
_Nan shi_ (Ch. 79, p. 4), in which the motive of the dog-heads, the women,
however, being of human shape, meets its striking parallel in Adam of
Bremen (_Gesta Hamburg, ecclesiae pontificum_, 4, 19), who thus reports on
the _Terra Feminarum_ beyond the Baltic Sea: 'Cumque pervenerint ad partum,
si quid masculini generis est, fiunt cynocephali, si quid femini,
speciosissimae mulieres.' See further KLAPROTH, _J. As._, XII., 1833, p.
287; DULAURIER, _J. As._, 1858, p. 472; ROCKHILL, _Rubruck_, p. 36."

In an interesting paper on Walrus and Narwhal Ivory, Dr. Laufer (_T'oung
Pao_, July, 1916, p. 357) refers to dog-headed men with women of human
shape, from a report from the Mon