Natural history, lore and legend

Shakespeare, whose writings form a mine of wisdom from which one can dig an appropriate wisdom-chip for every occasion, avers truly enough in the “Merchant of Venice,” that “Nature hath fram’d strange fellows in her time,” while the credulity of mankind has added to this goodly company many others too impossible even for the wildest freaks of nature to be held responsible for.

Of some of these abnormal forms we propose now to treat, and commence our chapter with some short reference to the pygmies. References to these are to be found in the works of many of the ancient writers, such as Homer, Pliny, Herodotus, Philostratus, Oppian, Juvenal and Aristotle. Strabo mentions them in his geography, but regards the belief in them as a mere fable, while some of the older authors suggest that very possibly exceptionally large monkeys⁠[13] might have been mistaken for exceptionally small men. While most writers affirmed that such a race was to be met with in Africa—Aristotle, for instance, locating them at the head of the Nile—some authors placed them in the extreme north, where the rigour of the climate was held a sufficient explanation of their stunted growth. Philostratus assigned them a home on the banks of the Ganges, and Pliny gave them local habitation in Scythia. Shakespeare, not only the fount of countless stores of quotation, but also the storehouse of ancient and mediæval lore, mentions the pygmies, though he gives us no hint as to their home. “Will your Grace command me any service to the world’s end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on: I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the furthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John’s foot; fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard; do you any embassage to the Pygmies!”

Homer, in the third book of the Iliad, refers to the conflicts between the pygmies and the cranes:—

Our readers may possibly wonder, as we have done, why the cranes should bear the pygmies such ill-will, but Pliny in his seventh book supplies the justification for the feud, as it appears that in the spring-time the pygmies sally forth in great troops, riding upon goats, searching for and devouring the eggs of the cranes, a state of things that no creature of proper parental instincts could be expected to submit quietly to.

Sir Thomas Browne, in his excellent book on vulgar errors, says that “Homer, using often similes as well to delight the ear as to illustrate his matter, compareth the Trojanes unto Cranes when they descend against the Pigmies;⁠[15] which was more largely set out by Oppian, Juvenall and many Poets since; and being only a pleasant figment in the fountain, became a solemn story in the stream and current still among us.” He declines to give credence to the pygmies and the tales that appertain to them and says that “Julius Scaliger, a diligent enquirer, accounts thereof but as a poeticall fiction. Ulysses Aldrovandus, a most careful zoographer, in an expresse discourse thereon, concludes the story fabulous. Albertus Magnus, a man ofttimes too credulous, was herein more than dubious,” and though he quotes the statement of Pigafeta that pygmies were found in the Moluccas, and that of Olaus Magnus as to their being encountered in Greenland, he declares that “yet wanting confirmation in a matter so confirmable, their affirmation carrieth but slow perswation.”

Maundevile, of course, is as fully prepared to believe in the existence of pygmies as of most other things, provided they be sufficiently outside ordinary experience. In his book he takes us “throghe the Lond of Pigmaus, wher that the folk ben of lytylle Stature, that ben but three span long; and thei ben right faire and gentylle. Thei maryen hem whan thei ben half Yere of Age, and thei lyven not but six yeer or seven at the moste, and he that lyvethe eight yeer men holden him there righte passynge olde. Thei han often times Werre with the Briddes of the Contree that thei taken and eten. This litylle folk nouther labouren in Londes ne in Vynes, but thei han grete men amonges hem, of one Stature, that tylen the Lond and labouren amonges the Vynes for hem. And of the men of our Stature han thei as grete skorne and wondre as we wolde have among us of Geauntes if thei weren among us. And alle be it that the Pygmeyes ben lytylle yet thei ben full resonable aftre here Age: connen bothen Wytt and gode and malice.” Another people of somewhat similar character that Maundevile professed to have met with in his travels were still more remarkable, for they “ne tyle not, ne labouren not the Erthe for thei eten no manere thing, and thei ben of gode colour and of faire schap aftre hire gretnesse, but the be smale as Dwerghes, but not so lytylle as ben the Pigmeyes. These men lyven be the smelle of wylde Apples, and whan thei gon ony far weve thei beren the Apples with hem. For if thei hadde lost the savour of the Apples thei scholde dyen anon.” Unfortunately he can only say of these interesting people that “thei ne ben not full resonable, but thei ben symple and bestyalle.”

Bishop Jordanus, in his “Mirabilia descripta,” tells of pygmies in “an exceeding great island what is called Jaua,” which our readers who are at all used to the substitution of the letter u for v, will at once recognize as Java, “where are many world’s wonders. Among which, beside the finest aromatic spices, this is one, to wit, that there be found pygmy men of the size of a boy of three or four years old, all shaggy like a goat.” He adds that they dwell in the woods, and we may not unreasonably conclude that these hirsute arboreals were a species of ape.

In the conflict of testimony, some affirming and some denying the existence of such a people, Marco Polo, writing it will be remembered in the thirteenth century, warns us that we must beware of counterfeits that are palmed off on the unwary as the real thing. “It should be known,” says he, “that what is reported respecting the dried bodies of diminutive human creatures or pigmies, brought from India, is an idle tale, such pretended men being manufactured in the following manner. The country produces a species of monkey of a tolerable size, and having a countenance resembling that of a man. Those persons who make it their business to catch them shave off the hair, leaving it only about the chin and those other parts where it naturally grows on the human body. They then dry and preserve them with camphor and other drugs, and having prepared them in such a mode that they have exactly the appearance of little men, they put them into wooden boxes and sell them to trading people, who carry them to all parts of the world. But this is an imposition, and neither in India nor in any other country, however wild or little known, have pigmies been found of a form so diminutive as these exhibited.” It will be noted that the very fact of a counterfeit implies a something to be counterfeited, and Marco Polo is clearly quite prepared to give in his adhesion to the affirmative side.

The belief in a pygmy race, first declared centuries before the Christian era, was held most fully in mediæval days; and modern travel and research has amply proved that—various elements of the marvelous stripped away—the belief was a sound one. Du Chaillu in Western Equatorial Africa met with a diminutive race of which the average height of the individuals who would submit to measurement was four feet five inches; and readers of Stanley’s books will recall his experiences with a similar people. On the authority of Dr. Parke, the Mikaba average four feet one inch, the Batwas four feet three inches, and the Akkas four feet six inches. Related to them in shortness of stature are the Bushmen of Southern Africa, averaging about four feet seven inches in height; and elsewhere, the Lapps, the Fuegians, the Ainos of Japan, and the Veddahs—all people of notoriously short stature.

Probably the Bushmen, or Bosjesmen, are the modern representatives of the Pygmaioi, for in their cave-dwelling, reptile-eating, and other peculiarities they agree entirely with the descriptions given by Herodotus, Pliny, and other ancient writers. The Bosjesmen are found, with all the peculiarities of their dwarfish race intact, as far north as Guinea. Winwood Reade, in his “Savage Africa,” gives many interesting details concerning them, and holds the view that they were the aboriginal race in Africa. Dr. Stuhlmann, Emin Pacha’s companion in many of his wanderings, succeeded for the first time in bringing pygmies alive to Europe, some members of the Akka tribe being brought to Berlin, where they were regarded with immense interest by the professors of anthropology.

The truthfulness of the ancient geographers being thus confirmed, it is quite possible that the tales of the conflicts of the pygmies with great birds may have a more solid foundation of fact than we are quite prepared to admit. The Maori traditions tell of the contests with the moa and other gigantic birds which formerly inhabited the islands of New Zealand; while the Jesuit missionaries give accounts of enormous birds once found in Abyssinia and Madagascar. All these are now extinct, but it may well be that to a dwarf race, armed only with bows and arrows, such birds would be foes by no means to be despised. One finds the trustworthiness of the old writers often so curiously confirmed that one hesitates in the case of many of them to assume too readily either gross credulity or a willful misstatement.

Amidst the millions of births in the animal creation there is scarcely any conceivable malformation, excess, or defect of parts, that has not at some time or other occurred; anyone turning to the medical and surgical journals will find many strange illustrations of this, or our readers may find much interesting information on this subject, and given in a less technical form, in the “Histoire Générale des Anomalies” of Geoffroi de St. Hilaire. But such malformations occur singly and at comparatively remote intervals; the anomalous departure from the type, the eccentricity of structure, is not hereditarily produced, does not become the starting-point of a new species. No natural malformation, allowance being made for the very restricted influence of hybridism, ever passes outside the species in which it is found or combines with it the character of any other creature, while even the limited possibilities of hybridism have a tendency to die out, owing to the sterility that is so marked a characteristic. Such monsters as Aldrovandus figures are utterly impossible, such as the body of a man conjoined to the head of an ass, and having one foot that of an eagle, and the other that of an elephant.

Abundant illustrations of the most un-natural history may be found in the works of Aldrovandus; his voluminous works on animals are very curious and interesting, and are richly illustrated with engravings at least as quaint in character as the text. His “Monstrorum Historia,” published in folio at Bologna in 1642, is a perfect treasure-house of rank impossibilities. Another book of very similar character is Boiastuau’s “Histoires Prodigeuses,” published in Paris in the year 1561, a strange assemblage of curious and monstrous figures.

The wondrous creatures of Aldrovandus, and it must be borne in mind that these are given in the most perfect good faith as contributions towards a better knowledge of natural history, are divisible into three classes:—creatures that are absolute impossibilities, such as fig. 3, a man having the head and neck of a crane; secondly, various species of malformation and abnormal growth, which do undoubtedly occur from time to time; and thirdly, other forms suggested by this second class, but carried to altogether impossible excess.

It is of course easy, having realized that a lizard with a forked tail is somewhat of a curiosity, to make a much greater wonder by representing, as he does, a ten-tailed lizard; and while a boy born without arms is a painful possibility, the wonder is undoubtedly greatly increased by also cutting off his legs, as Aldrovandus does, and replacing them with the tail of a fish.

The creature he calls hippopos, having the head, arms, and body of a man, but terminating below in the legs and hoofs of a horse, was (though here only two-legged,) probably suggested by the centaur myth. Amongst the other impossibilities which we must nevertheless again remind our readers the old writer brings forward in the most perfect sincerity as valuable aids to a better knowledge of the wonders of creation, is a man of normal growth, except that he has the head of a wolf, the lady, fig. 4, who is distinctly of harpy type, a ram-headed individual, and a boy with the head of an elephant.

This notion of the substitution of heads has a great charm for Aldrovandus. He gives us, elsewhere, a bird-headed boy, and horses, goats, pigs, and lions, all with human heads; while the “monstrum triceps capite vulpis, draconis et aquilæ” is, we venture to think, a creature that neither Aldrovandus, nor anyone else, ever did see or ever will see. According to the picture it had a human body and legs, differing however from those of ordinary humanity in being clothed with large scales. One arm was like that of a man, the other was the wing of an eagle, and a horse’s tail in rear was another distinctly abnormal growth, while surmounting all were three heads, those of a wolf, a dragon, and an eagle. There are many other such atrocities; while they are curious as showing the depth of credulity our forefathers could reach, it will readily be seen that they are the dullest things possible. Anyone with a slight knowledge of zoology could create them by the score, placing, for instance, on the neck of a giraffe the head of an elephant, giving it the body of an alligator, and finishing off all neatly with the tail of a peacock.

The multiplication, or suppression, or distortion of various parts is a very strong point with Aldrovandus. He illustrates for our benefit four-legged ducks and pigeons, and two-headed pigs, sheep, cows, and fishes; calves, dogs, hares, each walking erect on their hind legs and having no front ones, and pigs, cats, dogs, chickens, double-bodied but single-headed. He also tells us of headless men, and gives us a drawing of one, neckless, having the ears rising from the shoulders, mouthless, the nose a proboscis a foot or so in length; this and the eyes are on the back of the figure. Fig. 5 we may fairly include as an example of distortion, while fig. 6 is a monstrosity produced by suppression. In another place he gives a drawing of a man having two eyes in their natural position, and beyond each of these another, so that we have four in a row.

One quaint picture shows us two men wearing large ruffs and habited in quite the costume of “the upper ten” of the seventeenth century, but their faces are covered with thickly matted hair, their eyes peeping out like those of a skye-terrier. This idea was too grotesque not to utilize to the uttermost, so the next picture in the book is that of a young lady in the same plight.

The notion of hairy men, tailed men, and the like has no doubt arisen from the first introduction of the early writers and voyagers to various species of monkeys. Duris, one of the ancients, professed to know of the existence of an Indian tribe of shaggy, tailed men, while Ctesias, not to fall short in this pursuit of the marvellous, tells us of a certain Indian valley, or more probably a very uncertain one and exceedingly difficult to locate, where the inhabitants lived two hundred years, having in their youth white hair, which, with the ravages of time, gradually became quite black. In the “Periplus” of Hanno, about five hundred years before the Christian era, we have an unquestionable reference to the apes. “For three days,” says the Carthaginian admiral, “we passed along a burning coast, and at length reached a bay called the Southern Horn. In the bottom of this bay we found an island which was inhabited by wild men. The greater number of those we saw were females; they were covered with hair, and our interpreters called them Gorilloi.⁠[16] We were unable to secure any of the men, as they fled to the mountains, and defended themselves with stones. As to the women we caught three of them, but they so bit and scratched us that we found it impossible to bring them along: we therefore killed and flayed them, and carried their hides to Carthage.” Rather a cool proceeding this, granting either that they were really human or that the Carthaginians regarded them as such. We should at all events so regard it nowadays if, for instance, the crew of a whaler flayed some Eskimo ladies and brought their hides to Dundee.

Burton and other early English writers thoroughly believe in the existence of tailed men, and it has long been an article of belief that divers men even in this realm of England were born with tails. The Devonshire men stoutly contended that their Cornish neighbors were thus distinguished. According to Polydore Vergil, some at least of the men of Kent shared this peculiarity, and he very definitely asserts that it was a Divine judgment upon them for insulting one of His servants, Thomas à Becket. He tells us that when that prelate fell into disgrace with his sovereign, many people treated him with but little respect, and in Rochester he met with such contempt that amongst other marks of contumely the tail of the horse on which he was riding was cut off. By this profane inhospitality they reaped deserved reproach, for all the offspring of the men who did or connived at this thing were born with tails like horses. This mark of infamy we are told only disappeared with the gradual extinction of those whose forefathers had incurred this notorious and shameful penalty. In the “Loyal Scot” of Andrew Marvel we find the line, “For Becket’s sake, Kent always shall have tails.” As a line or two before this he has written “Deliver us from a Bishop’s wrath,” it is sufficiently evident that the passage alludes to the legend referred to.

John Bale, the writer of the “Actes of English Votaries,” is righteously indignant on the point. He writes as follows in his book, “John Capgrave and Alexander of Esseby sayth that for castynge of fyshe tayles at thys Augustyne, Dorsettshyre men had tayles ever after, but Polydorus applieth it unto Kentish men at Strood by Rochester, for cuttynge of Thomas Becket’s horse’s tail. Thus hath England in all other land a perpetual infamy of tayles by these wrytten legendes of lyes. An Englyshman cannot now travayle in another land by way of marchandyse or any other honest occupynge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his teethe that all Englyshmen have tayles. That uncomely note and report hath the nation gotten, without recover, by these laisy and idle lubbers, the monkes and the priestes, which could find no matters to advance their gaines by, or their saintes, as they call them, but manifest lies and knaveries.” John Bale was a post-Reformation Bishop, holding the see of Ossory during the reign of Edward VI, and was especially notable for his zeal in spreading the principles of the Reformed Church.

John Struys, a Dutchman, who visited Formosa in the year 1677, gives a description of a tailed man that is strongly suggestive of the monkey theory, except that he endows him with intelligible speech. He tells us that before he visited this island he had often heard of men therein who had long tails, but that he had never been able to credit it. Seeing, however, is proverbially believing. “I should now have difficulty in accepting it,” he writes, “if my own senses had not removed from me every pretence for doubting the fact, by the following strange adventure. The inhabitants of Formosa, being used to see us, were in the habit of receiving us on terms which left nothing to apprehend on either side; so that, although mere foreigners, we always believed ourselves to be in safety, and had grown familiar enough to ramble at large without an escort, when grave experience taught us that in so doing we were hazarding too much. As some of our party were one day taking a stroll, one of them had occasion to withdraw about a stone’s-throw from the rest, who being at the moment engaged in an eager conversation, proceeded without heeding the disappearance of their companion. After awhile, however, his absence was observed, and the party paused, thinking he would rejoin them. They waited some time, but at last, tired of the delay, they returned in the direction of the spot where they remembered to have seen him last. Arriving there, they were horrified to find his mangled body lying on the ground. While some remained to watch the dead body, others went off in search of the murderer, and these had not gone far when they came upon a man of peculiar appearance, who, finding himself enclosed by the exploring party, so as to make escape from them impossible, began to foam with rage, and by cries and wild gesticulations to intimate that he would make anyone repent the attempt who should venture to meddle with him. The fierceness of his desperation, for a time, kept our people at bay; but as his fury gradually subsided they gathered more closely around him, and at length seized him. As the crime was so atrocious, and if allowed to pass with impunity might entail even more serious consequences, it was determined to burn the man. He was tied up to a stake, where he was kept for some hours before the time of execution arrived. It was then that I beheld what I had never thought to see. He had a tail more than a foot long, covered with red hair, and very much like that of a cow. When he saw the surprise that this discovery created amongst the European spectators, he informed us that his tail was the effect of climate, for that all the inhabitants of the southern side of the island, where they then were, were provided with like appendages.” The measure of burning the man to avoid any future unpleasantness, seems a somewhat strong one, and attended with a very considerable element of risk to themselves, besides the grave personal inconvenience to the victim. The account is a very circumstantial one; how is it to be explained? One cannot accept the tail—or the tale; and yet it is painful to feel that the alternative is to brand John Struys as deliberately errant from the truth; and brave men who take their lives in their hands are above the meanness of vapouring or lying. In such a case one agrees entirely with Dr. Johnson: “Of a standing fact, sir, there ought to be no controversy. If there are men with tails, catch a homo caudatus.”

Africa and India, the two great wonder-lands of our forefathers, were the home of many strange specimens of humanity. Far away towards the sources of the Nile were the Nigriæ, ruled by a king who had but one eye, and that in the midst of his forehead. There, too, were found the Agriophagi, a people who lived on the flesh of lions and panthers: the Anthropophagi that fed on the flesh of men, and the Pomphagi that, like the modern schoolboy, eat all things. In that mysterious land too dwelt the Cynamolgi, whose heads were those of dogs. One old writer tells us that there was a tribe of one hundred and twenty thousand of these dog-headed men: they wore the skins of wild animals as their clothing, and carried on conversation in true canine style by yelps and barks. Sir John Maundevile, of course, knew all about these folk, since he found a great and fair island somewhere, called Nacumera, that was more than a thousand miles in circuit, and which had no other population. He tells us that they were a very reasonable people and of good understanding, the only fault that he finds with them being that they worship an ox as their god. Jordanus, Burton and others locate these peculiar people in India. Jordanus says that there are many different islands in which the men have the heads of dogs, but the women are purely human, and, moreover, very beautiful, whereat he very justly observes, “I cease not to marvel.” Ibn Bakuta, describing the people of Barah-nakar, says “their men are of the same form as ourselves, except that their mouths are like those of dogs, but the women have mouths like other folks.” Aldrovandus naturally does not miss such a chance as the dog-headed people afford him. Vicentius places them in Tartary, and Marco Polo heard of them in the island of Angaman. In Ethiopia we hear of a tribe of men that elected a dog as their king, and judged as best they might by his actions and barking the royal commands.

Ethiopia was a land of marvels, the focus and centre of all the wonders of Africa. It was held that the strange and monstrous forms there produced arose from “the agility of the fiery heat to frame bodies and to carve them into strange shapes.” It was reported by some that far within the interior of the country were to be found whole nations of noseless men, and that others were without the upper lip, while others again were without speech, and only made communication by signs. It is easy to see how the notion of a noseless people originated, since the negro physiognomy often has the nose a very flattened feature, while the people who could only make signs to the strangers that came amongst them evidently did so from a full realization of the hopelessness of speech. The negro lip is ordinarily a very conspicuous feature, so that the lipless people were a legitimate object of wonder. In one district all the four-footed beasts were without ears, even the elephants, the old author is careful to add, being in the same plight. Our readers will doubtless remember that the ears of the African elephant, outside this district, are of enormous size, and form one marked difference between him and his Asiatic brother. Elsewhere in this wondrous land we hear of men having three and four eyes, but the old traveller carefully explains that this tale merely arose—“not because they are thus furnished, but because they are excellent archers.” The “because” is not very evident, as the keenness and excellence of sight that would be of such value to an archer is scarcely to be obtained by the multiplication of eyes: it is quality rather than quantity that is needed here, and the old writer is careful to add, “thus much must I advertise my readers, that I will not pawn my credit for many things that I shall deliver.” What he saw for himself he could vouch for, and these things were themselves so strange that he could scarcely refuse to credit some of the wonders that were by hearsay, but he very justly declines responsibility.

Another old writer, Burton, in the same way cautiously evades fathering all the wonderful tales he tells of the men who live by scent alone,⁠[17] of those who by eating the heart and liver of a dragon attain to the understanding of the language of beasts, of those who have the power of making themselves “invisible, and so forth,” “but of these I doubt not but that the understanding reader knoweth how to judge and what to believe.”

On the isle called Dondum, an island that Maundevile seems to have discovered, or developed from his inner consciousness, are “folk of gret stature, as Geauntes: and thei ben hidouse for to loke upon: and thei han but on eye, and that is in the myddylle of the Front, and thei eten no thing but raw Flessche and raw Fyssche. And in another yle towards the Southe duellen folk of foule Stature and of cursed kynde that han no Hedes: and here Eyen ben in here Scholdres.” These are both mentioned by Pliny, but this passage of Maundevile must not be considered as confirmatory of Pliny’s wonders, as it is considerably less probable that the mediæval writer had seen these monsters than that he had seen the olden book, and transferred its wonders to his own pages. He, in fact, distinctly tells us that his nerves would not stand an interview with these giants, “sume of forty-five Fote or fifty Fote long. I saghe none of tho, for I had no lust to go”! He tells us, however, of the “Geauntes Scheep als gret as Oxen here, and thei beren gret Wolle and roughe. Of these Scheep I have seyn many tymes.” These we may reasonably conclude to have been Yak. As he tells us that men have often seen “the Geauntes taken men in the Sea out of hire Schippes and broughte hem to lond, two in one hond and two in another, etynge hem goynge alle rawe and alle quyk,” we can readily understand his reluctance to visit them. Elsewhere he professes to have found “wylde men hidouse to loken on for thei ben horned, and thei speken nought, but thei gronten as Pygges.” In yet “another Yle ben folk,”—so at least Maundevile tells us, though it may be but a traveller’s tale,—that are “of such fasceon and Schapp, that han the Lippe above the Mouthe so gret that whan thei slepen in the Sonne thei kovoren alle the face with that Lippe.” This story again is probably less a personal experience than a proof of scholarship, as Strabo describes such a people in his writings.

These great-lipped people have as neighbours “lytylle folk that han no Mouthe, but in stede therof thei han a lytylle round hole: and whan thei schalle eten or drynken thei taken throughe a Pipe or a Penne or suche a thing and sowken it in. Thei han no Tonge and therefor thei speke not but thei maken a manner of hyssynge, as a Neddre dothe.”

Pliny, Isidore, Strabo and other ancient authorities on the subject, tell of a tribe that have ears so long and pendulous that they reach to their knees, and therefore Maundevile knew of them too, and as Pliny knew of the Hippopodes so the mediæval writer tells us of “folk that han Hors Feet.” These, thanks we may assume to this peculiarity, are a nation of very swift runners, easily beating the record of any of our modern athletes, hence they are able to capture “wylde Bestes with rennyng” and add them to their bill of fare.

Amongst other strange specimens of humanity that we encounter in the pages of Maundevile, if not in the flesh, are the peculiarly strange “folk that gon upon hire Hondes and hire Feet as Bestes,⁠[18] and thei ben all skynned and fedred, and thei lepen als lightly in to Trees and fro Tree to Tree as it were Squyrelles.” In one district the people subsist chiefly on adders, partly because there is “gret plentee” of them, but more especially from appreciation. “Thei eten them at gret sollempnytees, and he that makethe there a Feste, be it nevere so costifous, and he han no Neddres, he hathe no thanke for his travaylle.” It would in fact be a parallel atrocity to a gathering of the City Fathers at the Mansion House and no turtle soup provided.

The long-headed people that formed part of the strange African fraternity we may reasonably conclude to have owed their peculiarity to the habit of employing pressure to mould the head into the compressed and elongated form, in just the same way that in recent times the heads of some of the tribes of North American Indians were manipulated. We may not unreasonably conclude, too, that some at least of the various curious people referred to by the ancient and mediæval writers were but accidental monstrosities, malformations of rare or casual occurrence. Such an one appearing amongst strangers would be regarded with great curiosity, and it would be but a short step farther to the lover of the marvellous to assume that somewhere or other in the region from whence he sprang, was a whole tribe or nation of such. The accidental resemblances, too, that we sometimes see in the human physiognomy to animals would be suggestive material to those in search of the wonderful. Porta’s book, “De Humana Physiognomonica,” gives many illustrations of heads, animal and human, showing resemblance of the men’s heads to those of the owl, lion, ox, and other creatures. Some of these are very clever, while others are absurdly forced and exaggerated.

Munster, under the section De mirabilibus et monstrosis creaturis quæ in interioribus Africæ inueniuntur, gives a picture in his book, where our old friend the man with the single immense foot, the one-eyed man, a two-headed fellow, the headless man with his eyes and other features in his chest,⁠[19] whose acquaintance we have made in fig. 1, and a wolf-headed man, are all grouped together as a matter of course, leaving the observer to conclude that anyone strolling through Central Africa would any day expect to come across such a gathering.

The classic myth of the centaur crops up again in the mediæval Ipotayne. These “dwellen somtymes in the Watre and somtyme on the Lond, and thei ben half Man and half Hors, and thei eten men⁠[20] whan thei may take hem.” Pliny writes of the Ægipanæ, half beasts, “shaped as you see them commonly painted,” a terse description that may have been amply sufficient for his original readers, but which leaves later generations considerably in the dark.

The belief in the mermaid was to our ancestors as real as the belief in the mackerel; and though we have in these later days surrounded all with an air of romance, the mermaid was to them no myth or poetic fancy, but as genuine an article of credence as any other creature of earth, or air, or sea. Phisiologus simply calls it “a beast of the sea,” which is a very unpoetic definition indeed; while Boswell in like manner calls it “a sea beast wonderfully shapen.” Nowadays one’s notion of a mermaid is of a fair creature, half woman half fish, basking amongst the rocks or rocking on the waves, and engaged in nothing more arduous than alternately combing her flowing golden tresses in the sunlight, and gazing in her constant travelling companion, her mirror, to study the effect of her work. The mediæval mermaid was of sterner temper; one old writer says that “they please shipmen greatly with their song that they draw them to peril and shipwreck;” while another affirms that “this beast is glad and merry in tempest, and heavy and sad in faire weather.” Bœwulf, the Saxon poet, styles the mermaid—

The syren myth of the ancients is clearly the origin of this belief in the malevolence of the mermaid. These syrens, to quote Spencer’s “Fairie Queen,”

The writer of the “Speculum Mundi” believed in mermaids as firmly as his contemporaries did, but he departs somewhat from the traditional lines of belief, and instead of making his mermaids brewers of the storms, sees in them merely rather exceptionally weather-wise and gifted prophets of the coming tempest. He says of them: “The mermaids and men-fish seem to me the most strange fish in the waters. Some have supposed them to be devils or spirits, in regard of their whooping noise that they make. For (as if they had power to raise extraordinary storms and tempests) the windes blow, seas rage, and clouds drop presently after they seem to call.” This was the popular belief, but he explains matters as follows:—“Questionlesse that Nature’s instinct makes in them a quicker insight and more sudden feeling and foresight of those things than is in man, which we see even in other creatures upon earth, as fowles, who feeling the alteration of the aire in their feathers and quills, do plainly prognosticate a change of weather before it appeareth to us.” So that really the bellowing of these maidens is brought down to the level of cock-crowing, the braying of the ass,⁠[22] or the scream of the peacock, as indications of weather-changes.

The classic writers limited the number of their syrens to three ordinarily, though they were not quite unanimous as to the exact number, while the mediæval mermaids were simply as unnumbered and as un-named denizens of the deep as the cod-fish. In mediæval times the mermaidens were not ordinarily credited with any particular musical gifts, though we remember seeing a Gothic carving of one playing on a violin. It will be remembered that with their antique prototypes the musical part of the entertainment was a very conspicuous feature:—

We will consider first the mermaid of the artist and the poet, and then see how the poetic and artistic type tallies with, or differs from, the mermaid as the ancient voyager vouches for her from ocular demonstration. Naturally the poets were unwilling to surrender the sweet song of the mermaid, and the bellowing and whooping of the matter-of-fact naturalists becomes with the poets a “dulcet and harmonious breath.” All our readers must be familiar with the beautiful passage in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”:—

Several other allusions to the mermaid will be found in the writings of Shakespeare and many others of our poets, though it would be somewhat foreign to our purpose to quote them at any length, fascinating as the subject would be. Our present prosaic intent is but to introduce the poets as witnesses to the widespread belief in such a creature as the mermaid and to show their sympathy with it.

In mediæval heraldry the mermaid frequently appears as a charge upon the shield, as a supporter of the arms, and as the surmounting crest. Any book upon heraldry will supply illustrations of this. We need only now refer to the allusive use of the charge in the arms of the ancient family of De La Mere, and to its occurrence as one of the badges adopted by the Black Prince. By his will in 1376 the Prince left to his son some hangings “de worstede embroidery avec mermyns de mier.” The mermaid is found, too, sometimes on paving tiles, bells, and in Gothic stone and wood-carving. It may be seen, for example, in a boss at Exeter Cathedral. In Winchester Cathedral the mermaid holds the accustomed comb, while her companion merman grasps a captured fish. In Lyons Cathedral a mermaid, or we may perhaps more justly say a mer-matron, nurses a mer-baby. A mermaid will be found carved on one of the misereres of Henry VII.’s chapel. Another may be seen at Exeter Cathedral, and a very good one again on a bench end at Sherringham church.⁠[25] It is also well known as a tavern sign, and the first literary club ever founded in England, including amongst its members Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden and Carew, was established in 1603 at the Mermaid in Bread Street, Cheapside.

Scoresby in his account of the arctic regions says that the head of the young walrus is very human in appearance; the creature has a way too of rearing itself well out of water to gaze at ships and other objects in a way that proves very suggestive of the mermaid idea. “I have myself,” he remarks, “seen one in such a position and under such circumstances, that it required very little stretch of imagination to mistake it for a human being. So like, indeed, was it, that the surgeon of the ship actually reported to me his having seen a man with his head just appearing above the water.” It is probable that the various species of seals, too, are responsible for many of the mermaid and triton stories, as at a little distance, and amidst the spray dashing over the rocks, they are very human-looking—at all events, perhaps sufficiently so to satisfy the credulity of those whose superstition made them susceptible to such ideas. On the other hand, a whaler or other old salt who has seen thousands of seals should scarcely be imposed upon in this way under any possible circumstances. Let us turn, however, to some of the experiences of those who profess to have seen the real thing in the way of mermaids, and see what they can tell us.

Hudson, the great navigator, whose narrative is strikingly free from any touch of imagination, and may in fact almost without fear of libel be called dry and tedious, tells us, in the following words, of a curious incident that happened to them while forcing a passage through the ice near Nova Zembla: “This morning one of our company, looking overboard, saw a mermaid, and calling up some of the company to see her, one more came up, and by that time she was come close to the ship’s side, looking earnestly on the men. A little while after a sea came and overturned her. From the navel upward her back and breast were like a woman’s, as they say that saw her; her body as big as one of ours; her skin very white, and long hair hanging down behind, of colour black. In her going down they saw her tail, which was like the tail of a porpoise, and speckled like a mackerel. Their names that saw her were Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayney.” “Whatever explanation,” says Gosse, in commenting on this story of the old voyager in his “Romance of Natural History,” “may be attempted of this apparition, the ordinary resource of seal and walrus will not avail here. Seals and walruses must have been as familiar to these polar mariners as cows to a milkmaid. Unless the whole story was a concocted lie between the two men, reasonless and objectless, and the worthy old navigator doubtless knew the character of his men, they must have seen some form of being as yet unrecognized.”

In the “Speculum Regale,” an Icelandic work of the twelfth century, we read of a creature that was to be found off the shores of Greenland—“like a woman as far down as her waist, long hands, and soft hair, the neck and head in all respects like those of a human being. The hands seem to be long, and the fingers not to be pointed, but united into a web like that on the feet of water birds. From the waist downwards this monster resembles a fish, with scales, tail, and fins. This shows itself, especially before heavy storms. The habit of this creature is to dive frequently and rise again to the surface with fishes in its hands. When sailors see it playing with the fish, or throwing them towards the ship, they fear that they are doomed to lose several of the crew; but when it casts the fish from the vessel, then the sailors take it as a good omen that they will not suffer loss in the impending storm. This monster has a very horrible face, with broad brow and piercing eyes, a wide mouth and double chin.” This is clearly a creature to be dreaded: we may, in fact, lay down the broad principle that the attractive and fascinating mermaid is the creation of the landsman and poet, while the sterner type is that of the mariner.

Pontoppidan, in his “Natural History of Norway,” has his mermaid story, but it is too long to quote, and it is, moreover, needless to do so, as all these narratives follow much the same general lines. Captain John Smith, too, in his account of his expedition to America in 1614, has a similar experience to relate, and many narratives of like tenour might be found in various old writers, but we will now turn to one or two that not merely describe a mermaid and merman seen, but the creature actually captured.

The following news item, from the Scots Magazine for the year 1739, refers to a creature less piscine than the typical form, but coming sufficiently near it for inclusion. “They write from Vigo, in Spain, that some fishermen lately took on that coast a sort of monster, or merman, five feet and a half long from its foot to its head, which is like that of a goat. It has a long beard and moustachios, and black skin somewhat hairy, a very long neck, short arms, and hands longer than they ought to be in proportion to the rest of the body: long fingers like those of a man, with nails like claws; very long toes, joined like the feet of a duck, and the heels furnished with fins resembling the winged feet with which painters represent Mercury.” We get considerably nearer the ideal in the seven mermaids that were said to be entrapped by some fishermen in their nets off Ceylon in the year 1560. Of these, several Jesuits, and the physician to the Viceroy of Goa, professed to be eye-witnesses, and the latter having dissected them with great care asserts that both the internal and external structure resembled that of human beings. Of the piscine moiety he appears to make no mention.

In the “Speculum Mundi” we have a very circumstantial account indeed of a mermaid who drifted inland through a broken dyke on the Dutch coast during a heavy storm, “and floating up and down and not finding a passage out againe (by reason that the breach was stopped after the flood), was espied by certain women and their servants as they went to milke their kine in the neighbouring pastures, who at the first were afraide of her, but seeing her often, they resolved to take her, which they did, and bringing her home, she suffered herself to be clothed and fed with bread and milk and other meats, and would often strive to steal again into the sea, but being carefully watched, she could not: moreover, she learned to spinne and perform other pettie offices of women, but at the first they cleansed her of her sea-mosse, which did sticke about her. She never spake, but lived dumbe, and continued alive fifteene yeares; then she died. They tooke her in the yeare of our Lord, 1403.” One can scarcely wonder at the poor sea-maid endeavouring to escape; the scraping down to get off the seaweed and barnacles prior to the introduction to the rough dress of a Dutch peasant and the homely lessons in spinning, bread-making, and other domestic cares, were a sad contrast to the life of wild freedom of yore amidst the rolling billows of the wild North Sea. We read, too, that she was taught to kneel before a crucifix—a task in itself, we should imagine, of considerable difficulty to a mermaid. When we read in another old author that “in the island Mauritius they eat of the mermaid, its taste is not unlike veal,” the last vestige of the poetry of the belief vanishes, while the added detail that “when they are first taken they cry and grieve with great sensibility” seems to bring the indulgence in such diet almost to cannibalism.

From veal to the “maiden clothed alone in loveliness,” of whom the poet sings, is a contrast indeed, and even the scraped mermaid turned Dutch vrouw is a very different creature to her whose—