Some Fabulous Beasts

Some Fabulous BeastsAuthor(s): Margaret RobinsonSource: Folklore, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Winter, 1965), pp. 273-287Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258298 .

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Some Fabulous Beasts

by MARGARET ROBINSON

MOST people have heard of dragons, mermaids, phoenixes and unicorns, and probably of griffins and basilisks. What is surprising is the number of other imaginary animals that have been written about, and largely believed in, in Europe since the Dark Ages. I have a list, by no means exhaustive - compiled mainly from English references and entirely omitting immediate sources outside Europe - which contains about 140 names of animals, birds, reptiles and fishes which do not exist in nature, from abath to zitiron and from avanc to ypotryll.

I say names, because the number of imagined beasts is only exceeded by the multiplicity of the names that have been applied to them. Frequently one finds several names for what is apparently the same creature, and nearly as often there is doubt about whether a different name denotes a slightly different idea. A monoceros, for instance, may clearly be exactly the same as a unicorn, the two words being the Greek and Latin for 'one-horned'; and a centaur is apparently very similar to a sagittary; but on the other hand all centaurs - or onocentaurs - are not alike: some have four legs as well as two arms whereas others, according to illustrations, have only four limbs altogether - two arms and two hind legs - and very much off-balance they look.

The names themselves in their English forms often sound out- landish, and of course their derivations may lead one back a good part of the way towards the origins of the animals. To take one of the most familiar of all - the dragon: there was a Greek word 'dracon', meaning 'a large snake', which was adopted through Latin into English and used in bestiaries and similar works in the sense of 'snake' from the thirteenth century onwards. Meanwhile the Greek and Latin words had been used, in the Septuagint and the Vulgate, to translate a Hebrew word which may have denoted, apparently, either a desert mammal such as the jackal or a large water-creature such as a whale, shark or crocodile. Perhaps this

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SOME FABULOUS BEASTS

usage contributed towards the identification of the 'draco' or dragon with the different conception, probably Oriental in origin, of a scaly, winged reptile breathing fire. Then presumably this much more awesome image was brought into play when a word was needed to denote any terrifying monster occurring in a strange context: the Northern Lights, seen in 793 before the sack of Lindisfarne, were fiery dragons; the monsters fought by Beowulf and St George were dragons; the big serpents who guarded treasure in the legends were dragons; and dragons were mentioned in the Bible, so they must be true.

Another interesting derivation is that of the manticore. It was first described by the Greek Ctesias at the beginning of the 4th century B.C., and it was supposed to be a man-eating animal from India. It had a body like a lion, except that it was red; a human head and face, but with three rows of teeth in each jaw, interlocking; and a tail covered with spines which it could shoot off at its enemies; and it made a noise like a trumpet. The name appears to derive from an Old Persian word which simply means 'man-eater', and of which the Greek transliteration should properly have been 'martichoras'; but apparently there is a corrupt text of Aristotle in which the word is 'mantichoras', and this led, amongst other versions such as 'mantissera', to English renderings of 'manticore' and 'man-tiger', which fitted in very well with its half-human make-up.

The name of the cockatrice has a provenance which is exceed- ingly complicated. It may possibly, according to one theory, derive from the Latin translation, 'calcatrix', of the Greek 'ichneumon', a tracker; the ichneumon (not to be confused with the ichneumon fly) really is a small animal found in Egypt, but various legendary properties were attributed to it and it may be that these were transferred to the Latin 'calcatrix', the Provencal 'calcatriz', and the Old French and Middle English 'cockatris'. On the other hand, there is a theory that the Old French forms were merely mis-spellings or abbreviations of the Low Latin word 'cocodrillus', for crocodile, and were used during the Middle Ages for any dragon-like animal - including the basilisk. The word 'basilisk' probably denoted originally a small snake (the Greek word 'basiliskos' was a diminutive of 'basileus', a king, and may have been used because as Pliny said, the snake had a mark like a crown

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on its head). But in the course of transliteration and translation a Middle English version 'basilicock' appeared, and this provided a chance for confusion with the cockatrice. Moreover, by the thirteenth century a belief had become established that the basilisk was hatched from a cock's egg by a toad or venomous serpent and therefore had a cock's body and a serpent's tail; this made the identification with the cockatrice even easier, and the heraldic cockatrice is usually shown in this form. Wyclif used the word 'cockatrice' to translate 'basiliscus' in the Vulgate, where a certain kind of snake was meant, and so once more the Bible conferred its seal of authenticity on the monster, and both creatures were usually credited with similar powers - those of extreme venomousness and of killing with their eyes, which will be mentioned again in another connection.

One or two aspects of the origins of fictitious beasts have been shown by these derivations. When we come to consider the questions of origins in more detail, we find that as far as written sources go we can divide them roughly into three categories: myths and legends, perpetuated in poetry and allegory; chronicles and travellers' tales; and scientific works in natural history, botany and medicine (the word 'scientific' often belonging according to modern ideas inside inverted commas, being based on theory and precedent and not on observation or experiment). In addition there is a certain amount of reported oral folklore and tradition; mostly of course fairly recently recorded.

A myth often turns out to be the original source of a monster, or at least of part of it. One sign for the sun in Egyptian hieroglyphics was a bird called 'bennu', apparently of the heron family, and possibly the Purple Heron. There is some evidence that it was as a migrant, or returning traveller, that it became connected with that other returning traveller the sun, which goes down every evening in the flaming sunset and rises again unharmed the next morning; and that hence the bird became the symbol of the union between night and day, life and death. By the time Herodotus heard the legend from the Egyptians it had become the detailed story of a gorgeously-plumaged bird, the only one of its kind, living for five hundred years in the Arabian desert; burning itself to ashes on a funeral pyre of aromatic twigs ignited by the sun and fanned by its own wings; and then emerging from the ashes with renewed youth.

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(In one version of the legend it flew to the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis to die in this way on the altar.) The Greek word phoenix, used for the bird in this legend, meant both 'Phoenician' and 'purple-red', the connection between the three things being presumably the purple dye made by the Phoenicians and the brilliant colour of the bird. Incidentally this is one of the stories which lent itself very well to adoption by the Fathers of the Church for use as an allegory: the resurrection of the phoenix could obviously be used to illustrate that of Christ, and the popularity of the story owed much to its frequent repetition in this way.

Another instance of a mythical or partly mythical origin is that of the mermaid, which has been exhaustively investigated by Miss Benwell and Sir Arthur Waugh. Oannes, the bringer of civilisation, who was one of a triad of Babylonian gods dating from 5,000 to 4,000 B.C., and who controlled the waters, was sometimes shown with a fish-tail, and so was Dagon of the Philistines, worshipped in Syria two or three thousand years later. There are fish-tailed divinities depicted on Greek vases, and tritons, nereids and oceanids are the last link between these early gods and the eventual mermaids and mermen. But besides this conception there was the separate idea of the siren, who was at first a woman-bird, not a woman-fish; and it was when these two combined that the familiar mermaid, sitting on a rock combing her hair and singing, was evolved - and, according to a number of eye-witness accounts, duly seen.

The myths were first chrystallized and recorded by poets, and our oldest European sources for many of the mythical beasts are Hesiod and Homer. Their material was re-used by poets all down the ages from Ovid to Tennyson, and sixteenth- and seventeenth- century poets such as Spenser, Ariosto, and Du Bartas were particularly lavish in their use of fantastic animals, birds and reptiles in simile and metaphor. (Shakespeare mentions some of them but curiously enough does not seem to have been familiar with any but the most common fabulous beasts, possibly because the less usual ones were mostly to be found in Latin bestiaries, of which there were no full-length English translations in his time.) But this poetic channel was frequently augmented by material from the second and third of the main sources that I mentioned:

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works written, unlike the poems and allegories, in pursuit of the factual truth by historians, geographers, explorers, and students of natural history. These writers are putting down what they believe to be true; what they have heard or read is true; or sometimes what they have heard or read but cannot quite believe to be true: there are of course a few exceptions who have crossed over the lines between credulity, wishful thinking, and downright fabrica- tion.

One of the earliest, and on the whole most reasonable, of the geographers is Herodotus in the fifth century B.C., who recorded contemporary stories about - amongst other things - the phoenix and the griffin. He is doubtful about the phoenix; the griffins he accepts without question, but he draws the line at the one-eyed men in whose country they are to be found. A little later Ctesias, writing about India, collected some more details about the griffin and also contributed the manticore, which was to persist very strongly - Aristotle perpetuated it in his biological works, where he also included sea-serpents, salamanders and dragons, but not many other specific unreal beasts, though he had theories about various kinds of animal which ought to exist, such as those occupying the element of fire (to correspond with the three other elements), and those living in the moon.

The sceptic Lucretius, in the first century B.C., flatly denied the possibility of such things as centaurs and chimaeras, but maintained that the earth had in its early years given birth to other kinds of monster, which had become extinct. His is one of the last voices of doubt for well over a thousand years, for with Pliny we are in amongst the amphisbaena, catoblepas, corocotta and leucrocotta, dragon, eale, giant ant, jaculus or flying serpent, manticore, nereid, monoceros, phoenix, salamander, sphinx and triton. It is only fair to say however, that he classes the griffin, pegasus and siren as fabulous. Pausanias, in the second century, the author of the 'Description of Greece', was not so credulous; he, like Aristotle quoted Ctesias on the manticore, but unlike him he refused to accept its three rows of teeth or the firing-off of the prickles on its tail: 'I believe' he says 'it is the tiger'. And another small instance of scepticism is given by Philostratus in his 'Life of Apollonius' in the third century; although he records marvels of many kinds he also relates that when Apollonius was asked

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whether he believed in the power of a vessel made of unicorn's horn against poison he replied 'I would believe that report, if I found in this country a king that was immortal and could never die'.

However, it was Pliny's 'Natural History' that persisted as the ultimate authority on the subject for fifteen hundred years. It was followed, and very largely copied, by Solinus in the second century, and at about the same time there originated, in Greek, the alle- gorical collections of animal stories known as the Physiologus. These made use of contemporary beliefs and existing fables; drew on the Septuagint and the Vulgate for the animals mentioned in the Bible; and inter-acted with the numerous scriptural com- mentaries by the early Fathers of the Church, both Greek and Latin, which frequently drew morals from these animals; and during the next five or six hundred years the various Latin and vernacular versions of the Physiologus developed into the books known as the Bestiary.

Meanwhile, material from all these sources was gathered up at intervals by a number of encyclopedic writers such as Aelian in the 3rd century, Isidore of Seville in the seventh, Alexander Neckam in the twelfth, and Bartholomew Glanvil, Vincent de Beauvais and Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century. These authors all took Pliny or Solinus as their ultimate authorities, but also quoted from any or all of the wirters previous to themselves, and after the thirteenth century, when Aristotle had been re- discovered, they quoted him too. Most of the medieval writers were quite uncritical and went on to affirm the peculiar properties of the caladrius, the bird which will turn its head away from a dying man but towards one destined to recover from his sickness; and of the amphisbaena, the snake which has a head at each end and can roll like a hoop in any direction. Their attitude is illustrated by a quotation from Solinus' dedication of his work, in Golding's sixteenth-century translation: 'For what can we callenge properly for our owne, sith the dilygence of menne in old tyme hath been such, that nothing hath remayned untouched unto our dayes...' and he goes on: 'For I thought good rather to take my choyse of all the old opinions, than to alter them.'

It was in the thirteenth century, in England, that the first contributions from chronicles and travellers' tales appeared, and

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one at least of these provided a considerable check to the often- repeated stories. Marco Polo had been to the Eastern regions where so many of the strange animals were thought to live, and he reported none of them. Instead he explained that the fire-proof material believed to be made of either salamander's skin or phoenix' feathers was in fact a mineral substance, asbestos; and he described the appearance of the only one-horned animals he had seen - not unicorns but rhinoceroses - and concluded that 'they are not of that description of animals which suffer themselves to be taken by maidens, as our people suppose, but are quite of a contrary nature'. (It is interesting, and unusual for him, that when he hears the eastern legend about the roc, the huge bird which can pick up an elephant in its talons, he does not query it but wonders whether this can be the same creature as the griffin; however, the roc story that he hears is located in Madagascar, an island which he has not visited and which is supposed to be unapproachable from the north on account of strong currents: it is still therefore outside the known world and in the realm of the fabulous.) In general Marco Polo is strictly truthful about marvellous beasts, or rather the absence of them; but unfortunately other eye-witness accounts of this period, and later, are just as convincing as his and much more misleading. Ralph of Coggeshall, for instance relates the story of the merman found near Orford Castle during the reign of Henry II, and Holinshed has the same story but puts it in the time of King John. Giraldus Cambrensis, on the subject of barnacle geese, relates 'what our eies have seen, and hands have touched'. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries at least four travellers maintained that they had seen unicorns somewhere in the east, and during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries numbers of broadsheets and items in periodical magazines appeared detailing various sightings of mermaids and sea-serpents.

These assertions were supported by such pseudo-veracious works as the Alexander romances, which extended all over Europe in their different versions from the seventh century onwards; the Letter of Prester John, which purported to describe conditions in the kingdom of that mythical ruler, and which circulated in Europe in the twelfth century; and the famous 'Travels of Sir John Mandeville' in the fifteenth century. (Several

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of the wilder stories in this book, for which the author is often derided, are not his invention at all but come straight out of Pliny.)

The invention and spread of printing at first helped to contribute to error by perpetuating the medieval treatises, in Latin or English, and by popularizing works such as Caxton's 'Mirrour of the World', which were still firmly based on every natural history book back to Aristotle. And in I6oo was published the very popular translation of Pliny's 'Natural History' by Philemon Holland, which spread Pliny's fantastic list of creatures to a wider audience than ever, with the added hazards of Holland's decorative Elizabethan prose and of his uncertain indexing. One example of the latter is that the word 'rhododendron' is indexed as a beast as well as a plant, but most unfortunately the reference he gives does not exist. There is also a certain amount of confusion over a passage which in Pliny relates to elephants, but which in Holland emerges as a most evocative flight of fancy on the subject of dragons: in 'a country of Aethyopia' he says 'it is reported that upon their coast they are inwrapped foure of five of them one within another like to a hurdle or lattice-work, and thus passe the seas to find out better pasturage in Arabia, cutting the waves, and bearing their heads aloft, which serve them in stead of sails'. An additional peculiar point is that the index entry for this passage reads: 'Dragons procure appetite to meat with the iuce of wild lettuce', and one cannot help wondering whether someone, at some point, has not confused the words 'lattice' and 'lettuce'.

Even the sixteenth-century naturalists Gesner and Aldrovandi, though much more accurate than their predecessors in their descriptions and illustrations of real animals, still included most of the fictional ones as well - often using the same picture for several different creatures --and they and Edward Topsell, in his 'Historie of Four-Footed Beasts' all showed, by their long catalogi auctorum, the traditional sources of most of their information. At the end of this century the writers on heraldry, such as Guillim and Legh, described and illustrated their own elaborate versions of such beasts as the dragon, cockatrice, wyvern, musimon, and yale.

At this point I should like to give two case-histories in some detail: and the first is the story of the griffins and the giant ants

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which shows how these accounts, once written down, have a tendency to gro:v like Falstaff's men in buckram until they reach a period of comparative scepticism, when they are likely to contract into a stock poetic image. Herodotus has a tale about a desert land, lying near the countries of the Indians and the Bactrians, where the sand is full of gold and where there are ants, smaller than dogs but larger than foxes, which live underground and bring the gold to the surface. These ants cannot bear the hot sun and stay underground in the mornings, so the Indians arrive in the desert at that time, riding on female camels, and fill bags with the gold, but the ants scent them and the Indians have to flee, hotly pursued by the ants, which are very fierce and swift. The foals belonging to the camels have been left behind, so that in their anxiety to return to them the camels shall outstrip the ants. Herodotus also has a quite separate story, which he found in a previous work, about a region in the north of Europe, somewhere near the Hyperboreans, where there is gold guarded by griffins but snatched from them by the one-eyed Arimaspians. Strabo reports an eye-witness who has seen the skins of the ants, as big as those of leopards. Ctesias - who has been described as a most entertaining liar - has more details about the griffins: they are four-footed birds with black, red and dark- blue feathers; legs and claws like those of a lion, and a beak like an eagle's. Pliny says that the griffins, living now in either Scythia or Ethiopia, are supposed to dig their gold out of mines; he mentions that they have ears, but he is doubtful about their existence. He too has the story about the giant ants, fixed in a region of North India called the Dardae: the ants are now the size of Egyptian wolves, and it is the hot sun of summer that they cannot bear, so that the Indians go then to steal the gold. Pliny says that the horns of some of these ants are to be seen in the Temple of Hercules in Erythrae, but neither he nor any writer that I have yet read mentions that they have horns. Philostratus tells us that the griffins are sacred to the sun in India, and draw his chariot; (and in later Greek writings they are sacred to Apollo and draw his chariot when he returns from the Hyperborean regions in the spring). Philostratus also has a deviant theory, which does not seem to persist, that the griffins' wings are webbed rather than feathered, and that they are rather poor fliers.

Solinus introduces a new note into the story of the griffins by 281




saying that their country, now 'Asiatic Scythia', abounds in precious stones, especially emeralds, as well as gold, all of which they guard fiercely; and he moves the giant ants to Ethiopia. Aelian has a long story in which the griffins and the ants have begun to be confused; for according to him men come to a north Indian country, near the Bactrians (this is where the ants used to live) on moonless nights to collect the gold which abounds there guarded by griffins; he is not sure whether the griffins really dig up the gold to build their nests with, as some say, but he thinks it more likely that griffins have no real use for gold, and that their fierceness is due to anxiety for their young ones. In another passage he gives a passing mention to 'the ants of India, which guard the gold', almost as if they are the same thing.

By the seventh century, when Isidore of Seville tells the story, the griffins are in the Hyperborean mountains and contain a rather higher proportion of lion in their composition than they did at first - their bodies are now lion-like as well as their legs and claws. Isidore's ants, which still live in Ethiopia, are of the shape as well as the size of dogs.

From now on the story about the stratagem for getting the gold away from the ants becomes more elaborate: sometimes the men take empty containers and leave them on the ground, because it is in the nature of ants to fill them (or they may be bright golden boxes which attract the ants); and sometimes the camels' foals are kept hungry so that they will cry and call their mothers back to them, or they are kept on the near side of a river which the ants will not cross. The griffins eventually start putting the gold --or emeralds, or agates - into their nests, either for decoration or as a kind of talisman; they may have copied this precaution from their relatives the eagles, who put amethysts in their nests to keep off serpents.

By the time of the Alexander romances and Prester John's Letter, the griffins are carrying Alexander's chair when he wishes to ascend into the sky; as for the ants, they are red and black, with six feet and teeth bigger than a dog's and tusks bigger than a wild boar's, and they have the men penned up in fortified places. The ants dig the gold underground all night, then come up by day to bring it to the surface and to feed; the men dare appear only at night, when they have to do their ploughing, sowing and other

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work, and when they also load the gold on to elephants, hippo- potami and other powerful animals.

There is now considerable confusion as to when the ants are underground and when they are on the surface: Mandeville's 'Travels' collates all the evidence and concludes that it is in summer that the heat drives them underground, so that men can come and pick up the gold, but that in winter they are on the prowl in the daytime, so that the trick of the empty containers must be used. Mandeville puts this story in Taprobane, or Ceylon: his griffins are in Bachary, and can carry off to their nests a horse and its rider, or two oxen yoked together (this is presumably why Marco Polo connected them with the roc). By the sixteenth century the ants have swollen to the size of oxen, and both ants and griffins have acquired long and terrible claws - those of the griffin so big that drinking-cups are made out of them. Finally, Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas in the seventeenth century has a well-known passage in which the 'Indian Griffin with the glistring eyes' and the 'Dardan Ants' are both exhorted to guard their gold against the covetousness of man.

The other case-history, which shows how the stories may be distorted from their older meaning, is that of the basilisk; but here my conclusions are very tentative because I have read only some of the sources (and in this connection I should like to refer grate- fully to my friend Miss Thomas of Cardiff University, who helped me to understand the Late Latin in which they are written and also contributed some translations of Greek passages and some suggestions about what they might all mean). If the basilisk is known now at all it is as the possessor of the 'basilisk glare': the power of killing by its look; yet the further back one goes the fewer allusions one finds to this attribute and the more the writers dwell on its extreme venomousness. Sometimes it is the basilisk's breath, or scent, that scorches or blasts everything in its path; and sometimes it needs only to sting the spear carried by a horseman for the poison to travel up the weapon and kill both horse and rider.

Pliny, who is one of the first to write about the basilisk, is ambiguous: he mentions it twice, and in one place he seems to say simply that it kills a man if it so much as looks at him, but in the other passage he merely says that it shares with the catoblepas the property that all who see its eyes die (the catoblepas was an animal

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with a small body but 'a great head hanging alway to the earth', and is now identified with the gnu). On the other hand Aelian definitely says that other much larger snakes die at the sight of the basilisk - that is, when they see it: and later writers repeat that any birds flying within sight of it - within their sight of it - die; or maintain that creatures are killed by its breath or its touch; and I have not so far found that any early writer other than Pliny mentions the fatal look.

So I am wondering whether it was originally the catoblepas which killed by looking - that is, you died when you saw its eyes - and whether the original distinction of the basilisk was only its extreme poisonousness, contagious as well as infectious, so to speak. However, since to come within range of a basilisk's poison was also to come within sight of it - and within its sight of you - perhaps Pliny may have connected it with the catoblepas on these grounds, and then transferred to it the catoblepas' own distinctive power of killing by looking. That there was some confusion between the two is shown by very similar stories - about soldiers on the march being suddenly slain - being told by Athenaeus in the third century of the catoblepas, and in the Alexander romances of the basilisk.

To return to the history of fabulous beasts in general: by the end of the sixteenth century, doubt was growing. Sir Thomas Browne, in his 'Pseudodoxia epidemica', rejected several of the commonly accepted creatures completely - he did not believe in centaurs, harpies, hydras or satyrs - and although Alexander Ross immediately restated most of the medieval fallacies in his 'Arcana microcosmi', there is an atmosphere of uncertainty about the subject during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One account of the finding of unicorns' horns mentions that these treasures 'are supposed to be rather of some sea-creature, than of anie land-beast', and in this, of course, it was right: the horns found were usually those of narwhals. The feeling, which had been growing for some time, that perhaps the accepted sources cannot be trusted after all, is illustrated even earlier by a passage in the 'Malleus Maleficarum', the work on witchcraft; the author, having recounted the traditional method of dealing with a basilisk (a man approaches it with a mirror and the basilisk encounters its own fatal glance and dies) continues: 'it does not seem plain, however,

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why the man who thus kills the basilisk should not die too, and we can only conclude that this is on account of some reason not clearly understood'. Later, in the eighteenth century, a similar doubt about the reasonableness of his information was evidently felt by the Swedish naturalist Pontoppidan, who wrote, in his account of some sea-monsters: 'the kraken has never been known to do any great harm, except they have taken away the lives of those who consequently could not bring the tidings'.

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, belief in strange beasts was dying out, and writers in the eighteenth century show very little interest in the subject. Modern critical enquiry into this, as into many other aspects of folklore, began in the nineteenth century, and one of the fields which was investigated was that of Celtic oral tradition, which until then had been largely unrecorded. The Celtic stories open up a whole new world of beasts which, perhaps because of their unfamiliarity, sound even more bizarre than the better-known ones. There is the boobrie, a gigantic water-bird which devoured cattle and sheep by the lochs of Argyllshire and had a voice like the roar of an angry bull; and the falm, which was seen only at break of day near the top of a mountain - and if any living thing crossed the track over which it had passed before the sun shone on it, certain death was the result. There was the gigelorum, which was the smallest of all created things and made its nest in a mite's ear; and the 'big beast of Lochawe', which had twelve legs and could be heard in winter floundering among the ice. Other animals had such names, in Gaelic, as 'beast of the lowering horn', and 'wonderful pig of the ocean', and a certain giant cat was known as 'Luchtigan the mouse-lord'. In addition the Celtic stories spoke of water-horses or kelpies, water-cats and water-dogs; in fact the coastal-dwelling Celtic peoples, like the island-dwelling Greeks, produced marine equivalents of nearly all their land-animals.

Even before the modern investigations into folklore, various theories were put forward to account for fabulous beasts. One idea was that the 'grotesques', or fantastic figures painted on the walls of grottoes in Italian gardens, were a possible source, and as early as the sixteenth century the writer of a dialogue on painting tried to explain these figures themselves by putting into the mouth of Michaelangelo the argument that an artist would paint 'wings

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instead of legs and leave out the arms, because wings look better, yet every limb that he so alters, regardless whether it comes from a lion, horse or bird, corresponds to the most perfect of that species to which it belongs', and he goes on 'sometimes people want to see something they have never seen before, and which seems more absurd to them than the likewise strange natural figures of animals and men'. Sir Thomas Browne derived monstrous animals from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and at least in the case of the phoenix he was on the right track; but presumably such symbolic representa- tions are themselves the product of even older myths.

Various secondary explanations have been put forward, and may be true in certain cases. It has been suggested, for instance, that the originals of centaurs may have been primitive tribes encountered by the early Greeks - little shaggy men who almost lived on horseback and who were expert with the bow and wise about the healing properties of herbs. Or, according to another theory, mistranslation and false etymology may have created the composite centaurs or 'horse-men' from a word really meaning 'horsemen' in the sense of cavalry, just as the composite mirme- coleon or 'lion-ant' may have meant a larger, fiercer species of ant - a veritable lion among the ants.

There might be misunderstanding of descriptions and explanations, such as that which apparently produced the vegetable lamb of Tartary. This was pictured as a kind of plant-animal, identical with an ordinary lamb except that it grew out of the ground on a stalk and lived by browsing on the grass all round within its reach. Henry Lee in his book on the subject showed that this conception arose when the first reports began to reach Europe from the east about the use of cotton, a material which could be spun and woven to make cloth but which originated as something fluffy growing on a plant; to people who thought in terms of wool for cloth-making the obvious answer was the vegetable lamb.

To conclude, it seems obvious that people always have enjoyed, and still do enjoy, the idea of there being animals yet undiscovered; as witness the interest in our own times in the rumours of the Nandi bear, the spotted lion of Kenya, and of course the abomin- able snowmen. When all else fails they are invented: science-fiction writers have an unlimited field for their creation and so have the authors of children's books, where perhaps E. E. Nesbit's

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psammead is one of the best-known beasts. Australia has its

bunyip, and in American tall tales we meet such creatures as the

goofang fish, which swims backwards to keep the water out of its eyes, and the side-hill dodger, with two short legs on the uphill side. In England, F. E. Hulme relates the belief once told to him that if, at a certain great iron-works, the fires were not occasionally extinguished, an uncertain but fearful something would be generated in them. And about the sea-serpent and the Loch Ness monster investigations are still being made and controversy continues.

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Some Fabulous Beasts