ng Hood and the Wolf? Every nation
has a congeries of such tales, and it is curious to mark how the same
animal reappears with the same imputed physiognomy in all of them. The
fox is always cunning, the wolf ravenous, the owl wise, and the ass
foolish. The question has been raised whether such traits were at first
actually ascribed to animals, or whether their introduction in story was
intended merely as an agreeable figure of speech for classes of men. We
cannot doubt but that the former was the case. Going back to the dawn of
civilization, we find these relations not as amusing fictions, but as
myths, embodying religious tenets, and the brute heroes held up as the
ancestors of mankind, even as rightful claimants of man's prayers and
praises.

Man, the paragon of animals, praying to the beast, is a spectacle so
humiliating that, for the sake of our common humanity, we may seek the
explanation of it least degrading to the dignity of our race. We must
remember that as a hunter the primitive man was always matched against
the wild creatures of the woods, so superior to him in their dumb
certainty of instinct, their swift motion, their muscular force, their
permanent and sufficient clothing. Their ways were guided by a wit
beyond his divination, and they gained a living with little toil or
trouble. They did not mind the darkness so terrible to him, but through
the night called one to the other in a tongue whose meaning he could not
fathom, but which, he doubted not, was as full of purport as his own. He
did not recognize in himself those god-like qualities destined to endow
him with the royalty of the world, while far more clearly than we do he
saw the sly and strange faculties of his antagonists. They were to him,
therefore, not inferiors, but equals--even superiors. He doubted not
that once upon a time he had possessed their instinct, they his
language, but that some necromantic spell had been flung on them both to
keep them asunder. None but a potent sorcerer could break this charm,
but such an one could understand the chants of birds and the howls of
savage beasts, and on occasion transform himself into one or another
animal, and course the forest, the air, or the waters, as he saw fit.
Therefore, it was not the beast that he worshipped, but that share of
the omnipresent deity which he thought he perceived under its
form.[101-1]

Beyond all others, two subdivisions of the animal kingdom have so
riveted the attention