The task remains
for special students of such matters to sift and analyze them, and
settle this debateable point.
There is another class of narrations, about which there can be no doubt
as to their purely imaginative origin. These are the animal myths, the
fairy stories, the fireside tales of giants and magicians, with which
the hours of leisure are whiled away. Several collections of these have
been made, the words and phrases taken down precisely as the native
story-teller delivered them, and thus they come strictly within the
lines of aboriginal literature. They are the spontaneous outgrowth of
the native mind, and are faithful examples of native speech.
Over a hundred such tales have been collected by Dr.
Couto de Magalhaes, as narrated by the Tupis of Brazil, and
many of them have been published with all desirable fidelity,
and with a philosophical introduction and notes, in a volume
issued by the Brazilian government, under his editorial care.[46]
A similar collection of Tupi stories was made by the late Prof. Charles
F. Hartt, whose early death was a loss to more than one branch of
science. It was his intention to edit them with the necessary notes and
vocabularies; but, so far as I know, the only specimens which appeared
in print were those he laid before the American Philological
Association, in 1872.
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