"gives an account
of the reasons for the colours of the gemsbok, hartebeest, eland, quagga
and springbok".(1) Speculative Bushmen seem to have been puzzled to
account for the wildness of the eland. It would be much more convenient
if the eland were tame and could be easily captured. They explain
its wildness by saying that the eland was "spoiled" before Cagn, the
creator, or rather maker of most things, had quite finished it. Cagn's
relations came and hunted the first eland too soon, after which all
other elands grew wild. Cagn then said, "Go and hunt them and try to
kill one; that is now your work, for it was you who spoilt them".(2)
The Bushmen have another myth explanatory of the white patches on
the breasts of crows in their country. Some men tarried long at their
hunting, and their wives sent out crows in search of their husbands.
Round each crow's neck was hung a piece of fat to serve as food on the
journey. Hence the crows have white patches on breast and neck.

(1) Brief Account of Bushmen Folk-Lore, p. 7.

(2) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.

In Australia the origins of nearly all animals appear to be explained
in myths, of which a fair collection is printed in Mr. Brough Symth's
Aborigines of Victoria.(1) Still better examples occur in Mrs. Langloh
Parker's Australian Legends. Why is the crane so thin? Once he was a
man named Kar-ween, the second man fashioned out of clay by Pund-jel, a
singular creative being, whose chequered career is traced elsewhere in
our chapter on "Savage Myths of the Origin of the World and of Man".
Kar-ween and Pund-jel had a quarrel about the wives of the former,
whom Pund-jel was inclined to admire. The crafty Kar-ween gave a dance
(jugargiull, corobboree), at which the creator Pund-jel was disporting
himself gaily (like the Great Panjandrum), when Kar-ween pinned him with
a spear. Pund-jel threw another which took Kar-ween in the knee-joint,
so that he could not walk, but soon pined away and became a mere
skeleton. "Thereupon Pund-jel made Kar-ween a crane," and that is why
the crane has such attenuated legs. The Kortume, Munkari and Waingilhe,
now birds, were once men. The two latter behaved unkindly to their
friend Kortume, who shot them out of his hut in a storm of rain, singing
at the same time an incantation. The three then turned into birds, and
when the Kortume sings it is a token that rain may be expected.

(1) Vol. i. p. 426 et seq.

Let us now compare wit