In the world that was, the fabulous animals that roved the land were creatures of unusual interest, though of limited number. More species were to be found in the deep. Thither, Pliny explains, fall the seeds from the innumerable figures of beasts impressed as constellations upon the heavens, and these seeds, being mixed together in the watery element, produce a variety of monstrous forms.

With animal life abounding in the thickets and fields of the earth, and for every bird and beast a fable, there was less incentive to invent new species of them than there was to make stories of ghosts, dæmons and faeries, or of men with beast attributes or lineage or some quality of caricature in their anatomy. With the coming of heraldry the category of strange creatures is greatly enlarged, but the shapes added by blazonry do not purport to be living things and have no place in geography or in literature, save in massive volumes where the quaint designs and quainter jargon of a curious erudition are preserved.

The ancient had naïve ideas about cross-breeding. Every unusual animal seemed a hybrid of two known species. These were produced in hot climates. Hence, says Pliny, arose the saying, common even in Greece, that “Africa is always producing something new.” The males and females of various species in that singular land, he thought, coupled promiscuously with each other, but not always with impunity. “The lion recognizes, by the peculiar odor of the pard, when the lioness has been unfaithful to him, and avenges himself with the greatest fury.”

There was a belief, which lasted nearer to the present time, that the savage dogs of India, two of which would make no scruple of attacking the lion, had tigresses for their dams. Diodorus noted that eastern Arabia produced beasts of double nature and mixed shape, and he deemed it reasonable that “by the vivifying heat of the sun in southern parts of the world many sorts of wonderful creatures are there bred.” Among these he cites the crocodiles and river horses of Egypt. He strains a point in support of his theory in the account of what he calls the Struthocameli of Arabia, “who have the shape both of a camel and an ostrich.” He describes their bodies “big as a camel, newly foaled,” their small heads with large black eyes, their long necks, the “hairy feathers” on their wings, their strong thighs, and “cloven hoofs.” This creature, says the Sicilian geographer, “seems both terrestrial and volatile, a land beast and a bird”—after all, only an inexact yet graphic portrait of the ostrich. That this fowl is a cross between a camel and a bird is an Arab notion; according to Aristotle it is of an equivocal nature, part bird and part quadruped. So its Persian name signifies, and sacred writers liken its voice to the bellowing of a bull.

Even the breezes take part in the creation of hybrids, so men have thought. That there is actual generative power in the wind is a belief older than the discovery of its function in carrying the fertilizing pollen of plants. Pliny records the popular belief that barren eggs are breeze-begotten; hence their name of Zephyria. The modern “wind-egg” for an egg without a shell laid by a fat hen, but supposed by Doctor Johnson not to contain the principle of life, comes from a similar notion. Male sheep are conceived when the northeast wind blows, and females when the south wind blows, according to the Romans. One of the heroic ballads of the Tartars personifies the wind as a foal which courses about the earth. The fable about Portuguese mares, widely credited by the ancients and roundly asserted by Pliny, is an echo of sailor reports on the fertility of Lusitania: “In the vicinity of Olisipo and the river Tagus, the mares, by turning their faces toward the west wind as it blows, become impregnated by its breezes, and the foals thus conceived are remarkable for their fleetness; but they never live beyond three years.”

The Unicorn

Best known animal of legend is the unicorn. There are two veritable unicorns, or animals with one horn—the rhinoceros and the narwhal. The accepted description of this animal gives it the narwhal’s straight and spirally twisted horn but none of the parts of the rhinoceros. It is pictured with the legs of a buck, the tail of a lion, and the head and body of a horse. Its markings suggest the zebra’s; its head is red, its body white, its eyes blue, while its horn is red at the tip, white at the base and black in between. The high authority of Aristotle has determined these points.

The ancients mention five different animals as having one horn set in the middle of the forehead. The most famous of these were the Egyptian oryx and the Indian ass. Pliny says the oryx gazes at the Dog Star when it rises, and sneezes in a sort of worship. It has the stature of a bull, the form of a deer, and hair that sets forward instead of backward. The Indian ass is described by Ctesias as having the traditional shape and hues of the unicorn, solid hoofs, and a horn a cubit in length. Filings of this horn, if taken in a potion, are an antidote to poison. Drinking cups made from it give immunity also from epilepsy. The Indian ass is so fleet it can be seized only when it leads its foal to pasture. In defense of its young it uses its horn, teeth, and feet, killing horses and men. It is sought for the horn and huckle bones, the latter, Ctesias declares, “the most beautiful I have ever seen”; they are as heavy as lead, he says, and of the color of cinnabar.

The third animal was the monoceros, on which the Orsæan Indians preyed. It had the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of its body was horse-like. The single black horn projecting from the middle of its forehead was two cubits long. It lowed like a bull, was of ferocious nature, wandered alone, and could not be taken alive. The two other unicorns of ancient story were the single-horned horse and the single-horned ox.

There was a second growth of the fable in the Middle Ages and the unicorn took on new dignities. It was the only animal that would attack the elephant, disembowelling the pachyderm with one blow of its sharp-nailed foot; and it charged the lion at sight. The king of beasts was constrained to kingly craft, dodging behind a tree. His assailant, says Topsell, “in the swiftness of his course runneth against the tree, wherein his sharp horn sticketh fast”; and the lion dispatches him at leisure. In his Display of Heraldry (1724) Guillim says the unicorn is never taken alive because “the greatness of his mind is such rather to die.” Mediæval intelligence at last hit upon a characteristic device to secure this creature without slaying him, and the bestiaries of the time record it. This was to place a young virgin near his haunts. As soon as he saw her he would run to her and lie down at her feet, placing his head in her bosom, when the hunters could halter him.

It was the alexipharmic virtues of the unicorn’s horn that most engaged the ages of faith, when the poisoning of princes was almost an article of statecraft. As late as 1789 it was used to test food at the court of France, and horns, usually of the narwhal, were in the royal museums. The ancients had made little of this. The reference of Ctesias to the horn of the Indian ass as an antidote for poison and a cure of the falling sickness stands alone. What was later made of this reputed power is shown in a passage from John of Herse, who pilgrimed to Jerusalem in 1389: “Near the field Helyon in the Holy Land is the river Mara, whose bitter waters Moses struck with his staff and made sweet, so that the children of Israel could drink thereof. Even now evil and unclean spirits poison it after the going down of the sun, but in the morning after the powers of darkness have disappeared, the unicorn comes from the sea and dips its horn into the stream, and thereby expels and neutralizes the poison, so that the other animals can drink of it during the day.”

According to Guillim, it became “a general conceit that the wild beasts of the wilderness used not to drink of the pools, for fear of venomous serpents there breeding, until the unicorn hath stirred them with his horn.” Thus its office was that of water-conner for the other beasts of the forest.

Cosmas Indicopleustes said he had seen the brazen statues of four unicorns set upon towers in the royal palace of Ethiopia. Frobisher found a dead “sea unicorne” on the Canadian coast with a broken horn two yards long. Into the hollow of the horn the sailors put spiders, where they presently died. In his second voyage (1564) Sir John Hawkins found the Florida Indians wearing pieces of the unicorn’s horn about their necks.

The unicorn was celebrated in Christian symbolism before it found a permanent niche in heraldry. When Balaam blesses Israel he says, “God led him out of Egypt even as the glory of the unicorn.” According to the Bestiare Divine de Guillaume Clerc de Normandie, the animal represents Christ, and its horn signifies the Gospel of Truth. It became a favorite charge in Scottish heraldry and James I of England made it the sinister support in the arms of Great Britain, replacing the red dragon of Wales.

Purchas the Pilgrim was always expecting news of the unicorn, hearing of it and doubting report. Browne avows his belief in the animal in a sardonic dissertation. Far from doubting its existence, he says, “we affirm there are many kinds thereof,” and he mentions the five classic animals, several fishes, and “four kinds of nasicornous beetles.” What he wants to know is which one possesses the alexipharmic horn. He complains that the animal is not uniformly described: “Pliny affirmeth it is a fierce, terrible creature; Vartomannus, a tame and mansuete animal; those which Garcias ab Horto described about the Cape of Good Hope were beheld with heads like horses; those which Vartomannus beheld he described with the head of a deer: Pliny, Ælian, Solinus, and Paulus Venetus affirmeth the feet of the unicorn are undivided and like the elephant’s; but those two which Vartomannus beheld at Mecca were footed like a goat. As Ælian describeth, it is in the bigness of an horse; as Vartomannus, of a colt; that which Thevet speaketh of was not so big as an heifer; but Paulus Venetus affirmeth that they are but little less than elephants.”

Browne proceeds remorselessly: The horns of the unicorn, as described by writers or preserved in collections, are too various. Some are red, some are black, and some have spiral markings, while “those two in the treasure of St. Mark are plain and best accord with those of the Indian ass.” Albertus Magnus describes one ten feet long, a narwhal’s, Browne suggests. Others are but fossil teeth and bones and petrified tree branches.

Yet the tradition long survived Browne. His contemporary, the Portuguese Jesuit Lobo, said that in Abyssinia he had seen the unicorn, in shape like a beautiful bay horse with a black tail. He could give no minute account, for it ran with prodigious swiftness from wood to wood, and never fed save when surrounded by animals that protected it. “The unicorn really exists in Tibet,” Huc affirmed after traveling there in 1846. At Kordofan, in 1848, a man, whose custom was to provide Baron Von Mueller with animal specimens, offered to sell him an a’nasa, which he described as of donkey size with a tail like a boar’s, and a single pendulous horn which it erected when it saw an enemy. In 1876 Prejevalski gave an account of the orongo, a stag-like creature with two vertical horns, which he said was common in Tibet; according to natives there were a few single horned individuals among the herds.

Every feature in the unicorn legend of the west has its counterpart in the Chinese books. Six species of unicorns are mentioned; one figures in the crest of the Mikado of Japan; another is sculptured in the avenue of animals that leads to the Ming tombs north of Peking. Another, and the best known, the ki-lin, appeared only in the reign of upright monarchs. It was called a spiritual beast, chief of the 360 kinds of hairy creatures. Its pace was regular, it ambled only on selected grounds, and its voice was like a monastery bell. So softly it trod that it left no footprints and crushed no living thing.

All a moon myth, says one ingenious writer. But Gould declares, “I find it impossible to believe that a creature whose existence has been affirmed by so many authors, at so many different dates, and from so many countries, can be the symbol of a myth.” He thinks it either a hybrid occasionally produced by the crossing of the equine and bovine families, or else the generic name for extinct missing links between horses, cattle, and deer.

Whence the world’s long belief in the unicorn? Was there such an animal, now extinct? Cuvier returns an emphatic negative: “The nations of modern days have only been able to drive back the noxious animals in the deserts, but have never yet suceeded in exterminating a single species.” He goes further: there could never have been a cloven-footed ruminant with a single horn, because its frontal bone must have been divided, and no horn could have been placed on the suture.

Ctesias may have woven some rhinoceros details into his picture of the so-called Indian ass. The Egyptian unicorn was called an oryx—a word perhaps related to the Sanscrit and Teutonic aurochs. There is a large African antelope the modern name of which is oryx. It is probable that the correct name has been retained, and that the oryx, or gemsbok, of to-day, is the unicorn of Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, Lampridius, et al. But the real oryx has two horns, while the fabled animal had but one because the Egyptians did not understand perspective in drawing.

The Griffin

Greek and Persepolitan griffins are curiously alike, and both may have derived from the winged lion of the Assyrians, emblem of the god Nergal. Griffin lore, however, is rich in details which have no religious significance. Herodotus speaks of the animal as guarding the gold of the one-eyed Arimaspians in Asia north of the Altai Mountains. Ctesias places it in the mountain barrier of India.

According to Ælian the griffin was a winged and feathered lion with an eagle’s head and a color scheme that suggests the German imperial flag—the breast plumage red, the wings white, and the dorsal plumage black; “a mixed and dubious animal,” Browne calls it. Ctesias says it had also blue neck feathers and red eyes. He describes the species as a race of four-footed birds the size of wolves, but Maundeville says they were as large and strong as eight lions and could carry to their nests “a great Horse, or two Oxen yoked together as they go to the Plough.” Of their talons the Indians made drinking cups. The griffins built their nests like the eagle, but laid therein agates instead of eggs. The Bactrians said that these birds dug gold out of the mountains and made their nests therewith, and the Indians carried off so much of it as falls to the ground. The Indians denied that the griffins were watchmen for the gold of their district or had any use for it; they said that when the birds see them coming to gather gold, they fear the intruders are after their young and assail them. Also they attack all other beasts and prevail over them, save only the lion and the elephant.

Fearful of their vengeance, the natives go not out to gather gold in the daytime, say the chroniclers, but under cover of night make their raids into a frightful desert where griffin and gold are found together. Companies of one thousand or even two thousand men set out, equipped with mattocks and sacks. The expeditions take from three to four years, for this region lies afar. If successful, the members return wealthy; but should they be detected in the act of theft, says Ælian, certain death would be their fate.

There are four explanations of this four-footed bird of classic legend and Welsh heraldry—that the winged Assyrian lion was taken for a portrait instead of a symbol; that the Samoyeds mistook mammoth bones in the gold-bearing district of the Ural Mountains for remains of monster fowls; that the griffins were merely Tibetan mastiffs of singular ferocity and reputed tigrine decent, and that they are an early form of the dragon. The so-called griffin’s claws in the museums of Dresden and Vienna and in the churches elsewhere are horns of the Caffrarian buffalo. Drinking cups made of them were used in treating epilepsy.

The Hippogrif

It would be vain to seek among animals the original of the hippogrif, a creature related to the griffin, though of more involved lineage, and like it treated sometimes as a bird, sometimes as a beast. The hippogrif is a product of mediæval romance, and wings its way as the courser of more than mortal knights over countries of fable, albeit they bear such names as Brittany, Abyssinia, Circassia, and Cathay. As the griffin was called a hybrid between the lion and the eagle, so the hippogrif was supposed to be a hybrid between the griffin and the horse. It had the head, wings, and fore claws of the griffin and the body, hind hoofs and tail of the horse. Its habitat was the Riphæan Mountains, source of the north wind. The hippogrif enters the Orlando cycle as the mount of an enchanter with a castle on the Pyrenees, but later serves the far adventures of the paladins of Charlemagne.

The Monster Rat

The Samoyeds and Chinese who found in the river banks of the north the frozen bodies of mammoths, with skin and flesh intact as if they had died but yesterday, reached the strange yet natural conclusion that this was a kind of monstrous burrowing rat. It figures in Chinese books as fen-shu, the “digging rat,” or yen-men, the “burrowing ox.” Why was it always dead when men came upon it? Because air and sunshine were both fatal to it; evidently in its wanderings underground it had broken the crust above it and died in the daylight. Sometimes the Yakuts saw the earth tremble and knew this great rat walked beneath. “There is got from it,” says the Chinese Encyclopedia, “an ivory as white as that of the elephant, but easier to work, and not liable to split. Its flesh is very cold and excellent for refreshing the blood.”

The Martikhora

In the jungles of Ind roved the martikhora—a creature with unpleasant affinities to men, the great cats, and the serpents. Its face was like a man’s with pale blue eyes and human ears but with three rows of teeth. Its body was as big as the lion’s and in color red like cinnabar. It had a tail like the scorpion’s and more than a cubit long. The martikhora, indeed, was a sort of anticipation of the machine gun, for it had one sting at the end of its tail, two at the roots of this member, and a fourth on the crown of its head; and these it projected to the distance of a hundred feet. The missiles, which were about a foot long and no thicker than fine thread, were fatal to every animal save the elephants. The natives, says Ctesias, hunted it from the backs of elephants. The name of the animal means man-eater, so-called because the beast carried off men and women. Its size, also, and general description, and the manner of hunting it all suggest the tiger as fearful Indians might report it. To this day the Cambodians think the whiskers of the tiger are a strong poison. The Malays call it a demon in beast form and speak of its Village where the houses are raftered with men’s bones and thatched with human hair.

In heraldry the martikhora is called the montegre, manticora, or man-tyger, and is pictured with the body of a lion, the head of an old man, the horns of an ox, and sometimes with dragon feet.

The Scythian Lamb

To match the barnacle goose which came from a nut, the ages of faith had the Scythian lamb which grew in a gourd. Maundeville has the best account, for did he not make a meal of one? The creature is found in “a kingdom that men call Caldilhe,” one of “the Countries and Isles that be beyond the Land of Cathay.” In this country “there groweth a manner of Fruit, as though it were Gourds. And when they be ripe, men cut them in two, and Men find within a little Beast in Flesh and Bone and Blood, as though it were a little Lamb without Wool. And men eat both the Fruit and the Beast. And that is a great Marvel.”

Friar Odoric makes a similar report. In other stories the Scythian lamb is a true animal attached to the earth by its umbilical cord. The Scythian lamb of botany is a woolly fern (Cibotium barometz) with a prostrate stem turned upside down. It is also called vegetable lamb and Tartarian lamb. In his Travels into Muscovy and Persia (1636) the ambassador from the Duke of Holstein describes it as a gourd like unto a lamb in all its members and with the lamb’s sacrificial relation to the wolf. It grows wild in the district of Samara, in Russia, and its growing is a kind of destructive browsing. “It changes places in growing, as far as the stalk will reach, and wherever it turns the grass withers, which the Muscovites call feeding.” When all available grass fails, it dies. The rind of the gourd is covered with a sort of hair, which makes a good substitute for fur. The natives showed the traveler certain skins, covered with a soft frizzled wool “not unlike that of a lamb newly weaned”—vegetable lamb, they affirmed. Scaliger declares that alone among animals the wolf feeds on this gourd and that wolf traps are baited with it.

Erasmus Darwin has these lines upon the Scythian lamb in his Botanic Garden:

So until 1915 stood the fable—seemingly just a tale of the credulous Middle Age, rationalized by later science and gently derided in still later rhyme. Then the scholarship of Berthold Laufer, basing itself mainly upon Chinese texts, gave it long backgrounds. The Scythian lamb has been in turn a mollusk, a marine sheep, a bird, the cotton-plant, a strange half-human creature and—this part is surmise—an allegory of the early Christian Church, the Lamb of Revelation that “stood on the mount Sion.”

Unto this day fabrics are made of the undyed fleece of the true Scythian lamb. Byssus silk is the name it bears in commerce, and Taranto is the seat of its manufacture. The silk is derived from the fibrous foot by which mollusks of the species called the pinna, found in the waters about southern Italy, attach themselves to rocks. The original Scythian lamb was this mollusk and its umbilical cord was the byssus, or foot, which anchored it. The genesis of the legend seems to be a statement of Aristotle that these creatures have within them a parasite, a small crab, nicknamed the “pinna-guard” which in gathering its own food collects fishes also for its blind, stationary, and helpless host. Without the pinna-guard, says Aristotle, the mollusk soon dies; and he cites the latter to illustrate his observation that in the sea “there are certain objects concerning which one would be at loss to determine whether they be animal or vegetable.” After Aristotle’s time, and in the first centuries of the Christian era, byssus fabrics, which may have been a by-product of pearl fisheries in the Persian Gulf, appeared in the Mediterranean countries.

Here, then, is an animal living within what passed for a vegetable that was “rooted in earth,” and that produced a substance later known as marine wool. But how did the Adriatic mollusk and its tenant crab become a lamb-tenanted gourd, or a veritable sheep attached to the soil by a fleshy stem, in the plains of Asiatic Scythia? And how did this tiny partnership of the sea floor become in turn a phœnix-like creature of the air and the grisly Yedua, man-monster of Talmudic legend? The process illustrates the part that travel tale, the carrying of confused reports from place to place, has in creating myth. Though the fable grew up in the Roman Orient and reached China only through such reports, the superior historical sense of the Chinese has made their annals the key to its meaning.

The first Chinese record in point, not later than A. D. 220, speaks of a fine cloth in the Roman Orient “said by some to originate from the down of a water sheep.” This may be inference from the almost contemporary phrase of Alciphron, the Greek sophist, who calls byssus textiles “woolen stuffs out of the sea.” In the sixth century Procopius recites that each of the five hereditary satraps of Armenia had from the Roman emperor a golden-hued cloak made from “wool gathered out of the sea.” In an account by the Arab Istakhri, written about A.D. 950, it is said that an animal runs out of the sea and rubs itself against the rocks, “whereupon it deposes a kind of wool of silken texture and golden color.” Robes of this, worn by the Ommiad princes at Cordova, were valued at a thousand gold pieces each.

By etymological error and a device of ancient trade, the mollusk, which had already become a water sheep, got itself wings. Pinna, its name, is also the classic Latin word for “feather,” an ambiguity which may have confused the Arabs; and the filaments of the shellfish are rather like the plumage of fowls. Byssus weaves were held at so high a price that they were counterfeited in feather fabrics, and to promote their sale the discovery of a wonderful bird was at length announced. The Arab, Kazwini, calls it abu baraquish and pictures it as like the stork; but “every hour its plumage glitters in another color, red, yellow, green and blue.” The fabric from its plumage is named “phœnix-feather gold” in a Chinese work of the Mongol period. Skilled artisans, it is related, weave a soft golden brocade from the neck feathers of the phœnix, which in the spring drop to the foot of the mountains. These were probably the feathered headskins of peacocks, which in China are still made into jackets.

When the Annals of the T’ang Dynasty (618-906) were compiled, the water sheep had become a land animal of Syria, or Fu-lin as that country was called. Here is the Chinese account: “There are lambs engendered in the soil. The inhabitants wait till they are going to sprout, then build enclosures around as a preventive measure for wild beasts that might rush in from outside and devour them. The umbilical cord of the lambs is attached to the soil, and when forcibly cut off they will die. The people, donning cuirasses and mounted on horseback, beat drums to frighten them. The lambs shriek from fear and thus their umbilical cord is ruptured. Thereupon they set out in search of water and pasture.”

It was part of the tradition of the marine sheep that it yielded its fleece of its own accord, and this was carried over into the later Chinese story that the Scythian or Syrian lamb must itself rupture the umbilical cord, which others could not sever without killing it. The appearance of men in armor to frighten it to this end is elucidated by a passage from the thirteenth-century Arab traveler, Abul Abbas. After the pinna comes ashore and lets its wool escape, he records, it is pounced upon by large crabs. In the Chinese story, these crabs have become men on horseback and their shells are the cuirasses worn by the horsemen.

A debased version of the same story appears in the Mongol period when a thirteenth-century Chinese traveler describes the “sheep planted on hillocks” in the countries of the western sea. The umbilical cord of a sheep is planted and watered. At the time of the first thunder peals it begins to grow. When matured, the creature is frightened by the sound of wooden instruments and, breaking off the cord that attaches it to the ground, roams about in search of herbage. This was the tale Odoric and Maundeville heard; that the lamb was inclosed in a gourd may have been their own invention, or the report of some early attempt to relate it to the cotton pod, which about a generation ago was conjectured to be the basis of the fable.

“Creatures called Lords of the Field are regarded as beasts,” says the Talmud. The same creature is also called the Man of the Mountain. “It draws its food out of the soil by means of the umbilical cord; if its navel be cut, it cannot live,” says Simeon a thirteenth-century rabbi. In the detailed portrait by Rabbi Meir the timid vegetable lamb undergoes a wolfish transformation: “There is an animal styled Yedua, with the bones of which witchcraft is practiced. It issues from the earth like the stem of a plant, just as a gourd. In all respects the Yedua has human form in face, body, hands, and feet. No creature can approach within the tether of the stem, for it seizes and kills all. As far as the stem stretches, it devours the herbage all around. Whoever is intent on capturing this animal must not approach it, but tear at the cord until it is ruptured, whereupon the animal soon dies.”

Laufer thinks that the Jewish legend is early Christian allegory misunderstood; that the Man of the Mountain is “the lamb that stood on the mount Sion,” a symbol of the Church itself the followers of which are attached to the earth by sensual pleasures; and that the mounted horsemen of the Chinese version, who cause the lambs to break their connection with the earth, may be the two hundred thousand horsemen of Revelation that symbolize the Last Judgment.

Gold-guarding Ants

Bits of turquoise, chips of obsidian arrow heads, and fragments of prehistoric jewelry are found in the little heaps of earth which ants bring up from underground on the sites of vanished cities in New Mexico. On the Pajarito plateau ant-gold is not unknown. Ant-gold is the theme of one of the most circumstantial and puzzling stories told by ancient travelers. Herodotus lays its scene somewhere near Cabul. The Indians of that district send forth men in search of gold into a sandy desert “where live great ants in size somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxes.” A number of these were caught by hunters and sent to the Persian king. The ants live underground and, “like the Greek ants, which they very much resemble in shape, throw up sand-heaps as they burrow.”

There is gold in the sand, but the ants are formidable enemies and fleet in pursuit. So the Indians harness a female camel between two males, and the female is one that has lately dropped a foal. The inroad is timed so that the caravans arrive when the sun is hottest and the ants are hiding from the heat. Herodotus continues:

“The Indians fill their bags with the sand and ride away at full speed; the ants, however, scenting them, as the Persians say, rush forth in pursuit. Now these animals are so swift, they declare, that there is nothing in the world like them; if it were not, therefore, that the Indians get a start while the ants are mustering, not a single gold-gatherer could escape. During the flight the male camels grow tired and begin to drag; but the females recollect the young which they have left behind, and never flag. Thus, say the Persians, the Indians get most of their gold.”

In substance the story is repeated in the letter which Prester John sent to the Pope in the twelfth century. The “emmet valley” also appears in the Arabian Nights. Megasthenes said that the plain tenanted by the monster ants is three thousand stadiæ in circumference and lies eastward in the mountains in the kingdom of the Dardæ. In winter the ants dig holes and pile the auriferous earth in heaps at the pit mouths. Pliny declares the ants are of the color of cats and the size of Egyptian wolves; that they work in winter and are despoiled in summer. “The horns of the Indian ant,” he remarks, “fixed up in the temple of Hercules at Erythræ were objects of great wonderment.” Nearchus, admiral of Alexander, reports having seen skins of these ants as large as leopard skins. Ctesias speaks in his Persica of a horse-pismire which was fed by the magi and became of such monstrous size that it took two pounds of meat a day to victual it. As late as the sixteenth century there is a story by Busbequius that the Shah of Persia sent one of the Indian ants as a present to Sultan Soliman at Constantinople. Maundeville transfers the whole scene to Taprobane (Ceylon) and varies the incidents: Men do not enter ant-land but send thither mares to which empty vessels are suspended. “It is Pismire nature that they let nothing be empty among them, but anon they fill it, and so they fill those Vessels with Gold.” When the foals neigh in the distance their dams return to them with a golden burden.

What were these ants, and whence the fable?

It will be noted that the griffins were cast in a similar rôle in another Indian gold quest. It may be accepted that good-sized animals, or the skins of animals, were seen in menageries, museums, and temples, and identified with the ant custodians of the Scythian metal. It has been suggested that these were some other burrowing animal—the anteater, or the marmot; but neither is fleet of foot. M. de Weltheim thought the Herodotoan ant might be the corsac, a small Asiatic fox.

Philology has a word to offer. The gold collected on the plains of Little Tibet is popularly known as pippilika, or “ant gold,” from the belief that ants bring it up, or bare the veins which carry it. McCrindle asserts that the gold-diggers were neither ants nor other animals, but “Tibetan miners, who, like their descendants of the present day, preferred working their mines in winter when the frozen ground stands well and is not likely to trouble them by falling in.” Thus the raid and retreat would be accomplished with the same expedition with which any tribe would make a sudden foray on another tribe equipped with equal ordnance and cavalry. Metaphor still speaks of the miner as a mole or a human ant.

The Questing Beast

In Le Morte d’Arthur, Malory describes a singular animal with an economy of phrase that whets curiosity. Arthur had had a heavy dream of griffins and serpents that devoured his land, and to put it out of his mind he went a-hunting. And he followed a white hart until his horse fell dead under him and his quarry was embushed. “He set him down by a fountain, and there he fell in great thoughts. And as he sat him so, him thought he heard a noise of hounds, to the sum of thirty. And with that the king saw coming toward him the strangest beast that ever he saw or heard of; so the beast went to the well and drank, and the noise was in the beast’s belly like unto the questyng of thirty couple hounds; but all the while the beast drank there was no noise in the beast’s belly; and therewith the beast departed with a great noise, whereof the king had great marvel.”

Followed a knight hight Pellinore, and sought to borrow the king’s horse to pursue this animal, and the king would have taken over his quest for a twelvemonth, but he would not. After Pellinore’s death it is Palomides that rides across the pages of romance, well in the rear of the questing beast.

The Beasts of Revelation

The beasts of Revelation were but symbols; yet they moved like realities through the imagery of the Church, and, undergoing a sea change, appeared alive in the distant Atlantic Islands of Irish epic. St. John beheld the shapes of locusts like unto horses prepared for battle; “and their faces were as the faces of men, and they had hair as the hair of women, and they had tails like unto scorpions.” He saw also a beast coming up out of the earth; “and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.” Above all, John saw the beast that came up out of the sea, a leopard with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion, and with the dragon’s authority; and the beast had seven heads and ten horns, “and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.” The Whore of Babylon rode this beast—composite of seven mountains and ten kings, the text explains—to world power and to downfall; and rode on into literature, and an unending controversy.

American Contributions

Animal elders are America’s main contribution to the collection of fabulous beasts. The Indian believed that every species had a giant ancestor like itself in form, but with supernatural powers to protect it. Hunters who killed more animals than they needed for food felt the vengeance of the elder beasts. The latter gave a tribe its medicine, and themselves became totems. They are sometimes represented as in human form and living in stately lodges. The Pacific coast of South America has also stories of a house-haunting ram, a repulsive tree-dweller, a water-monster resembling a distended cowskin, and a creature with the head of a heifer and the body of a sheep.

According to members of the Forest Service, American lumberjacks have their own mythology. Product of camp-fire chaff and a whimsical humor, the creatures that people it are noted here only because, both in name and in nature, they illustrate the traditional instinct for composites that elsewhere has wrought to more serious ends. They include the tote-road shagamaw, with the head of a lion, the forepaws of a bear and the hind legs of a moose; the splinter cat, which crushes hollow trees in search of raccoons; the hugag, with buffalo body and jointless legs, which sleeps leaning against a tree; the sausage-like wapaloosie, which lives on fungi; the billdad, which kills fish with its tail; the gumberoo, which explodes when it gets too near a fire; the snoligoster, a spiked and legless crocodile, and the lachrymose squonk. A common human figure in these tales is the grotesque giant, Paul Bunyan.

The Prodigies of Heraldry

In the later totemism, which is called heraldry, the following fabulous creatures with human, animal, or bird attributes, or an admixture of all of these, were represented on crests and coats of arms: allerion, chimera, cockatrice, dragon, griffin, harpy, hydra, lyon-dragon, lyon-poisson, mermaid, montygre, martlet, opinicus, pegasus, sphinx, sagittary, satyr, tarask, tityrus, unicorn, wyvern, winged lyon, winged bull.

Several of these are noted elsewhere in this study, and a word will serve for the rest. The allerion is an eagle without beak or claws. The chimera, says Bossewell, is “a beast or monstre having thre heades, one like a Lyon, an other like a Goate, the third like a Dragon.” The hydra is a seven- or nine-headed water serpent. The lyon-dragon is a composite of a lion and a dragon, and the lyon-poisson of a lion and a fish. The martlet is a swallow without feet. The opinicus is a composite of camel, dragon, and lion. The pegasus is a winged horse. The sphinx is a figure with a woman’s head and breasts, a lion’s body, and usually eagle’s wings. The sagittary is the centaur of antiquity with the head, arms, and body of a man from the waist up, united to the body and legs of a horse. The heraldic satyr has a human face, a leonine body, and the horns and tail of an antelope. The tarask is a dragon-basilisk on the shield of Tarascon. “The tityrus is ingendred between a sheep and a buck-goat,” says Guillim. The wyvern is a serpentine dragon with a long tail and only two legs. The winged lyon is an achievement of Venice, the winged bull a memory of Assyria.

Other heraldic creatures, not so well authenticated, are mentioned by Randle Holme in his Academy of Armory. These include the ass-bittern, the cat-fish, the devil-fish, the dragon-tyger, the dragon-wolf, the falcon-fish with a hound’s ear, the friar-fish, the lamya, compounded of a woman, a dragon, a lion, a goat, a dog, and a horse; the lyon-wyvern, the minocane or homocane, half child and half spaniel dog; the ram-eagle, the winged satyr-fish, and the wonderful pig of the ocean.

The menagerie of blazonry has been enlarged by representing nearly all of the animals at times with fish-tails, when they are said to be marined. The zodiacal sign of the capricorn, shown as half goat and half fish, is a familiar example. Sometimes the sea-horse is drawn as an enlarged hippocampus, sometimes with the forequarters of a horse and a fish tail. Griffins and unicorns are marined in German heraldry.