Humboldt's explanation is, that the Caribs, being the cleverest and
strongest Indians, are also the most imaginative; and therefore,
being fallen children of Adam, the greatest liars; and that they
invented both El Dorado and the dog-heads out of pure wickedness. Be
it so. But all lies crystallise round some nucleus of truth; and it
really seems to me nothing very wonderful if the story should be on
the whole true, and these worthies were in the habit of dressing
themselves up, like foolish savages as they were, in the skins of the
Aguara dog, with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in
order to astonish the weak minds of the Caribs, just as the Red
Indians dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, and deer, with
foxtails, false bustles of bison skin, and so forth. There are
plenty of traces of such foolish attempts at playing 'bogy' in the
history of savages, even of our own Teutonic forefathers; and this I
suspect to be the simple explanation of the whole mare's nest. As
for Raleigh being a fool for believing it; the reasons he gives for
believing it are very rational; the reasons Hume gives for calling
him a fool rest merely on the story's being strange: on which
grounds one might disbelieve most matters in heaven and earth, from
one's own existence to what one sees in every drop of water under the
microscope, yea, to the growth of every seed. The only sound proof
that dog-headed men are impossible is to be found in comparative
anatomy, a science of which Hume knew no more than Raleigh, and which
for one marvel it has destroyed has revealed a hundred. I do not
doubt that if Raleigh had seen and described a kangaroo, especially
its all but miraculous process of gestation, Hume would have called
that a lie also; but I will waste no more time in proving that no man
is so credulous as the unbeliever--the man who has such mighty and
world-embracing faith in himself that he makes his own little brain
the measure of the universe. Let the dead bury their dead.