The following is a research dump of materials relating to monsters and spontaneous generation.
Katharine Park; Lorraine J. Daston
Past and Present, No. 92 (Aug., 1981), 20-54.
The treatment of monsters and attitudes towards them evolve noticeably during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Characteristically, monsters appear most frequently in the context of a whole group of related phenomena: earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial apparitions, and rains of blood, stones and other miscellania.
...As the period progressed, they appeared more and more as natural wonders — signs of nature's fertility rather than God's wrath.
...By the end of the seventeenth century, monsters had lost their autonomy as a subject of scientific study, dissolving their links with earthquakes and the like, and had been integrated into the medical disciplines of comparative anatomy and embryology. [page 23]
Christian writers drew on the rich classical tradition of divination as well as on Judaic thought for what came to be the canon of prodigious events: comets and other celestial apparitions, floods, earthquakes, rains of blood or stones, and of course monstrous births. [page 25]
Monstrum, according to Augustine, is synonymous with prodigium, since it shows [monstrat] God's will. Reference note: Augustine, De civitate Dei, xxi. 8. Isidore of Seville developed Augustine's ideas in his Etymologiae, xi. 3, a chapter of great influence. [page 25]
There was a widespread conviction that monstrous births were far more common than in earlier times, a sign of the last days. According to an English ballad of 1562:
The
Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all
thinges shall appeare,
God will
wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is
sene this yeare.
The selye
infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues
and pygges so straunge,
With other mo
of suche mishape,
Declareth
this worldes chaunge. [page 34]
(Footnote: "A Discription of a Monstrous Chylde" (London, 1562), repr. in A Collection of Seventy-Nine Black-Letter Ballads and Broadsides, ed. Lilly, pp. 202-3.)
Virtually all of the writers on prodigies adopted the solution proposed by Augustine: nature is the will of God. Augustine and his sixteenth-century followers allowed nature little autonomy as a causal force. All enquiry into the proximate causes of monstrous births is wasted time. God shapes and alters the natural order in accordance with his pleasure, so that nature becomes a cipher, a mirror of his will. [page 34]
From fear to delight, prodigy to wonder, sermon to table-talk — the transition can be traced in the changing adjectives used to describe monsters in the titles of French and English books and broadsides. By the end of the sixteenth century, words like "horrible," "terrible," "effrayable," "espouventable" had begun to yield to "strange," "wonderful," "merveilleux." This shift signalled a change in interpretation. Although God was of course still ultimately responsible for all monstrous births, the emphasis shifted from final causes (divine will) to proximate ones (physical explanations and the natural order). No longer a transparent glass revealing God's purposes, nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will — and sense of humour — of her own. This new vision informs a large and heterogeneous body of literature: books of secrets or natural wonders. [page 35]
Wonder books were catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and minerals. They lay in the medieval tradition of spuria like the De secretis naturae attributed to Albertus Magnus, or the De mirabilibus auscultationibus which circulated under the name of Aristotle, and of question-and-answer books modelled on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata or the Salernitan Questions. [pages 35, 36]
From all appearances, wonder books were intended largely as pleasure reading. Fenton, for example, proposed his translation of Boaistuau as a bracing alternative to "the fruitlesse Historie of king Arthur and his round table Knights"and the "trifeling tales of Gawin and Gargantua." In fact, monsters were clearly associated with two of the most common and popular forms of escapist literature: travel books and chivalric romance. Monstrous races — men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests — had played a part in descriptions of Africa and Asia since antiquity and still figured in Renaissance cosmography.1 Giants and dwarfs were an important element in the tradition of romance.2 [page 37]
Footnotes
1: See, for example, Sebastian Munster, Cosmographiae universalis libri vi (Basle, 1544), p. 1080. This tradition is the principal subject of Wittkower's "Marvels of the East."
2: For example, the genealogy of Pantagruel in Rabelais, Pantagruel, ch. 1, includes the names of a large number of giants taken from chivalric romance.
Once the familiar canon of prodigies, with all its popular and religious associations, was presented as natural wonders or secrets — the visible effects of hidden causes known only to a few — it gained a new aura of intellectual respectability, and became, according to the introductory epistle of the French Lemnius, "a subject of great fashion and not vulgar."
This change in sensibility was accompanied by a change in interpretation. Beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, there was a growing tendency in the wonder books, as opposed to the highly conservative broadside literature, to play down or even deny the prodigious character of monstrous births. [page 40]
While popular literature retained its traditional prodigious and prophetic thrust, educated culture, in this as in other areas, was tending to detach itself from what it perceived as the ignorance and superstition of the folk — "the most deceptable part of Mankind," as Thomas Browne called them in Pseudodoxia epidemica.
In wonder literature, then, monsters — along with the rest of the canon of prodigies — began to cast off their religious associations. This trend was accompanied by the movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones. Paré, for example, listed thirteen separate causes of monstrous births in his Des monstres. Of these only three (God's glory, his wrath, and demonic intervention) were supernatural; the rest represented an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on), plus a new causal category — artifice — to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars. [page 41]
Implied in this shift in causal thinking is a new way of talking about nature. Whereas in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent, a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned, she acquired a new autonomy in the wonder books. Typically, she was personified; Paré, for example, called her the "chambermaid to our great God." [page 41]
Monsters were treated as jokes or "sports" (lusus) of a personified nature, rather than as divine prodigies. [page 43]
In The Advancement of Learning, [Bacon's] programme for the reform of human knowledge, he divided natural history into three parts: the study of nature "in course", or natural history per se; the study of nature "erring", or the "history of marvels"; and the study of nature "wrought, or the history of the arts." Although the "miracles of nature", including monsters and the rest of the prodigy canon, could be "comprehended under some Form or Fixed Law," for Bacon they nonetheless constituted a coherent category rather than a miscellaneous collection of phenomena. All phenomena were natural, but nature operated in three distinct modes, corresponding to the three subdivisions of natural history: the natural (or regular), the preternatural, and the artificial. [page 43]
Monsters illuminated both the regularities of nature, for "he who has learnt her deviations will be able more accurately to describe her paths," and also furthered the inventions of art, since "the passage from the miracles of nature to those of art is easy." [page 43]
Both the history of marvels and the history of the arts revealed nature in extremis, either forced to wander from her wonted paths by the "obstinancy and resistance of matter" in the case of marvels, or "constrained and moulded by human art and labour." The "experiments of the mechanical arts" and nature's own deviations lifted the "mask and veil, as it were, from natural objects, which are generally concealed or obscured under a diversity of forms and external appearances." As nature struggled to overcome the recalcitrance of matter or the fetters of art, she assumed the novel forms of "pretergeneration", monsters, which served as models for the novelties of art. [page 44]
All too often mere rarity excites the ignorant. [page 46]
Footnote: Bacon, Novum organon, ii. 31, in Works, xiv, p. 141.
Although neither Bacon nor Bayle exempted the learned from uncritical belief, both implied that "vulgar minds" were less likely to curb their penchant for wonders by a conscientious search for natural causes, particularly if religious issues were at stake. [page 46]
Wonder literature transformed those freaks from religious prodigies into natural marvels. [page 51]
By the end of the eighteenth century, the canon of prodigies had been dissolved. Astronomers studied comets; geologists studied earthquakes; doctors studied monsters. [page 53]
By the mid-eighteenth century an appetite for the marvelous had become, as Hume declared, the hallmark of the "ignorant and barbarous", antithetical to the study of nature as conducted by the man of "good-sense, education, and learning."
...Hume implied that this division corresponded to a cultural divide between the vulgar and the learned. For the unlettered populace, monsters and their ilk retained a piquant tinge of the supernatural; for men of "sense and learning," the prodigy canon had been broken up and reintegrated into the wholly natural order. Monsters and kindred prodigies no longer served as a point where the natural and supernatural, the natural and artificial, and the little and great traditions met on common ground. [page 54]
"Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters."
Rudolf Wittkower
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 5 (1942), 159-197.
The following pages are concerned with a strictly limited aspect of the inexhaustible history of monsters, those compound beings which have always haunted human imagination. The Greeks sublimated many instinctive fears in the monsters of their mythology, in their satyrs and centaurs, sirens and harpies, but they also rationalized those fears in another, non-religious form by the invention of monstrous races and animals which they imagined to live at a great distance in the East, above all in India. [page 159]
But even the history of this one trend in the conception of monsters cannot yet fully be written, for the "Marvels of the East" determined the western idea of India for almost 2000 years, and made their way into natural science and geography, encyclopaedias and cosmographies, romances and history, into maps, miniatures and sculpture. They gradually became stock features of the occidental mentality, and reappear peculiarly transformed in many different guises. [page 159]
...[It] is certain that, owing to Ktesias' book, India became stamped as the land of marvels. He repeated all the fabulous stories about the East which had been current from Homer's time onwards and added many new ones, including tales of the weather, of miraculous mountains, diamonds, gold, etc. He populated India with pygmies, who fight with the cranes; with the sciapodes, a people with a single large foot on which they move with great speed and which they also use as a sort of umbrella against the burning sun; and with the cynocephali, the men with dogs' heads "who do not use articulate speed but bark like dogs. There are headless people with their faces placed between their shoulders; there are people with eight fingers and eight toes who have white hair until they are thirty, and from that time onwards it begins to turn black; these people have ears so large that they cover their arms to the elbows and their entire back. In certain parts of India are giants, in others men with tails of extraordinary length "like those of satyrs in pictures." Or fabulous animals he describes the martikhora with a man's face, the body of a lion and the tail of a scorpion, the unicorn and the griffins which guard the gold. Indian cocks, goats and sheep, he asserts, are of prodigious size. [page 160, 161]
The most important book on India was... produced after the end of the campaigns. Its author, Megasthenes, was sent about 303 B.C. by Seleucus Nicator, the heir to Alexander's Asiatic empire, an ambassador to the court of Sandracottus (Chandragupta), the most powerful of the Indian kings who resided at Pātaliputra — the modern Patna — on the Ganges. Megasthenes' treatise survives in Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny, Arrian, Aelian and others. Megasthenes gives for the first time comprehensive statements about the geography of India, about its inhabitants, its social and political institutions, its natural products, its history and mythology. Although this report was unsurpassed in reliability and abundance of material for many centuries to come, Megasthenes relates in it the stories of Indian marvels, of fabulous races and animals.
He not only repeated the old tales but added considerably to the list. We hear of serpents with wings like bats, of winged scorpions of extraordinary size; he repeats from Herodotus the story of the gold-digging ants; he knows of the people whose heels are in front while the instep and toes are turned backwards, of the wild men without mouths who live in the smell of roasted flesh and the perfumes of fruits and flowers. The Hyperboreans, he relates, live a thousand years; there are people who have no nostrils, with the upper part of their mouth protruding far over the lower lip, and others who have dog's ears and a single eye on their forehead. [page 162]
...[The] knowledge of India in the Hellenistic and Roman world and consequently in the early Middle Ages was based mainly on the two works by Ktesias and Megasthenes.
How was it possible, it will be asked, that such a scholarly mind as that of Megasthenes, not to mention Ktesias and other writers, could be induced to accept the fabulous stories which have been mentioned? The reasons seem to have been manifold. In some cases, as for instance the cynocephali and the cyclopic races, the Greeks brought with them ideas which were similar to those of the Indians; they may have had a common mythical origin in times beyond our historical reach. [page 163]
It has been established beyond doubt that Ktesias' and Megasthenes' unicorn is the Indian rhinoceros; for in India and China people still attribute the power of protection against poison to the horn of this animal — the same power which Ktesias reported about the unicorn. [page 164]
It is characteristic of the progressive scientific attitude of the Greeks that they themselves turned against the stories of marvels, prodigies and fabulous races. Censure by a number of later authors has survived. The most critical is perhaps Strabo, whose Geography was written in the first years of our era. [page 165]
After recording the superstitious beliefs found in [Greek works concerning fantastic races and creatures] concerning the existence ofcynocephali, sciapodes, pygmies, etc., he thus concludes:
The books contained these and many similar stories, but when writing them down I was seized with disgust for such worthless writings which contribute neither to adorn nor to improve life. [page 166]
One of the main sources for the medieval lore of monsters was Pliny's Historia naturalis (finished 77 A.D.). [page 166]
...[The] Christian writers of the Middle Ages gave preference over Pliny to yet another author. He is Solinus who in the 3rd century A.D. wrote his Collectanea rerum memorabilium, large parts of which are based on Pliny with an emphasis on remarkable and strange occurrences, on fables and marvels. [page 167]
The way to reconcile the marvels with Christian doctrine was shown by St. Augustine. Chapter 8 of the 16th book of the Civitas Dei is entitled: "Whether certain monstrous races of men are derived from the stock of Adam or Noah's sons?" The Christian outlook was founded upon the words in Genesis (9, 19): "These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread." Augustine's answer is given with cunning ingenuity.
He argues: the stories about fabulous races may not be true — that would be the simplest way out. If, however, these races do exist, they may not be human; certainly some authors would describe monkeys and sphinxes as races of men and be even proud of their ingenuity if we did not happen to know that they are animals. If, on the other hand, these races exist and are really human, then they must be descended from Adam. Just as there exist monstrous births in individual races, so in the whole race there may exist monstrous races. As no one will deny that the individual monstrosities are all descended from that one man so all the monstrous races trace their pedigree to that first father of all. Man has no right to make a judgment about these races. For God, the creator of all, knows where and when each thing ought to be or to have been created, because he sees the similarities and diversities which can contribute to the beauty of the whole. [pages 167, 168]
Isidore, in his encyclopaedic work, the Etymologiae (written probably between 622 and 633), simply stated that monstrosities are part of the creation and not "contra naturam." [page 168]
The monster as magical prodigy — this idea is, of course, thoroughly classical and points back via Rome and Greece to Babylonia. But as his material was taken from the geographical and not the magical branch of ancient knowledge there was no literary basis for more than the general allusion contained in his explanation of the term portent (Based on Cicero, De nat. deorum II, 3, 7.) — quite apart from his religious standpoint. And indeed, Isidore's reason for the discussion of monstrosities lay in the encyclopaedic plan of his work; from the 7th book onwards the reader is led from the Holy Trinity through the hierarchy of the Church to man himself, and here the fabulous races had to appear as inhabitants of the distant parts of the globe; after that the survey of the animal world begins. [pages 168, 169]
Isidore's chapter on monsters appears verbally in Hrabanus Maurus' encyclopaedia De universo (c. 844); the whole work is a copy of the Etymologiae enriched by a mystical commentary. [page 169]
The importance that had been attached to the marvels may be judged from the fact that we find them in all the great encyclopaedias of the 12th and 13th centuries: in the Imago Mundi, attributed to Honorius Augustodinensis, in Gauthier of Metz's Image du Monde (1246) in Gervase of Tilbury's Otia imperialia, and in the popular encyclopaedia by Bartholomew the Englishman, written between 1220 and 1240, in the widely read Trésor of the Florentine Brunetti Latini from the 1260's, as well as in Vincent of Beauvais' standard encyclopaedia of the latter Middle Ages. [pages 169, 170]
We know that pictures of the fabulous races existed in antiquity. St. Augustine mentions a mosaic in the harbour esplanade of Carthage with elaborate representations of monstrous peoples. [page 171]
Folio 37r of the Milan manuscript shows a scene in which a seated ape ("Scimia") is confronted by a standing satyr ("Saturis"). A similar grouping of the two figures is well known to us from innumerable Egyptian examples, the satyr seems to be dependent on the jackal-headed Anubis, and the staccato movement and gestures of the figures still betray something of the Egyptian prototype. [page 172]
The different pictorial types have their origin in different translations by Greek authors from the Sanskrit. Skylax, writing in the 6th century, B.C., called this race [....], i.e. people with ears as large as a winnowing fan, and added that they sleep in their ears, while Ktesias said that their ears cover the arms as far as the elbows. [page 173]
A further, and perhaps the most important, class of works which shows marvels going back to classical prototypes consists of the maps of the world. On these the representation of marvels is a constant feature. The Hereford map of the last quarter of the 13th century is perhaps the most outstanding example. Here we find pictures of the fabulous races and animals distributed all over the globe. India and Ethiopia have the main share. In India live the sciapodes, the pygmies and giants, the mouthless people, the martikhora and the unicorn. North of India, in Scythia and bordering countries and islands, there are horse-hoofed men, people with long ears, Anthropophagi and Hyperboreans and also the Arimaspians who fight with the griffins. Ethiopia is inhabited by satyrs and fauns, by people with long lips and people with their head in their shoulders and breasts, by basilisks and gold-digging ants, etc. [page 174]
It seems that by far the greatest number of mediaeval maps depend directly or indirectly upon the famous mappa mundi which Agrippa, the friend of Augustus, had had designed and which was painted on a wall of the portico of Vipsania in Rome. [pages 174, 175]
From about the 12th century onwards the marvels penetrated into the field of religious art. The fabulous races were the products of God's will who "is righteous in all his ways and holy in all his works." [page 176]
In England a rich collection of monstrosities, mostly carved on misericords, appears during the later Middle Ages. And in Italy the fabulous races seem to have been often represented on mosaic pavements of the 11th and 12th centuries. The best example has survived in the Cathedral of Casale Monferrato where they appear together with the seven-headed dragon of the Apocalypse and a representation of Jonah; unfortunately also this pavement is too fragmentary to disclose its iconographical programme.
The interpretation of a number of monsters in ecclesiastical art is sometimes not easy, for it has to be established whether the mediaeval craftsman received his material through the geographical-ethnological tradition or from the Physiologus and its derivatives, the Bestiaries. However, from the 13th century onwards the marvels were incorporated into a group of Bestiaries and in this way the two branches — the encyclopaedic and the mystical — which had sprung from the same antique roots, were again united. [page 177]
This is also the time in which preachers used for their sermons the stories of the Gesta Romanorum, that late mediaeval collection of moralized fables and tales which had an unrivalled success down to the 16th century. In such a collection the marvels could not of course be omitted. The 175th tale "De mirabilibus mundi" contains a full account of them. The people with the long lower lip appear here as symbols of justice, those with the long ears listen to the word of God, the cynocephali are the preachers who ought to be coarsely clad just like the dog-headed people, and the headless monsters are the symbol of humility, and so on. [page 178]
...[The marvels] even had their share in the making of history. They played an important part in an historical mystification which excited the people of the 12th and 13th centuries and found an echo in Europe down to the 17th century. This is the story of the great Christian kingdom of Prester John in the remote East. The first mention of his realm occurs in Otto of Freising's chronicle about the middle of the 12th century. In 1164 the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus received a letter from this imaginary ruler which was soon circulated throughout Europe and survives in many copies. It contains a long description of the unequalled power and wealth of Prester John's empire. All the marvels appear prominently in the narrative which is a conglomeration of everything that was current about the East at that time. And it was just this fact which helped to convince people of the existence of that empire, for all their sources confirmed that the marvels existed in those distant parts of the world. The legend of Prester John became not only a stimulus to poets, but it was above all one of the strongest impulses for the exploration of Asia. [page 181]
One of the most heated discussions of the Middle Ages was that about the existence of the Antipodes. St. Augustine had rejected the idea and almost ridiculed the notion that there are men who walk with their feet opposite ours, i.e. on the other side of the globe, and from the 8th century onwards the belief in them was banned as heretical. [page 182]
Sebastian Münster (1489-1552) from Ingelheim was one of the most widely read authors of the Renaissance. As professor in Basle this true polymath taught Hebrew, Theology, Geography, Astronomy and Mathematics. His copious Cosmographia, first published in German in 1544, contains a description of all countries and peoples, their laws and institutions. This work, which also appeared in Latin, French and Italian translations, was one of the standard encyclopaedias for the layman right through the 17th and even in the 18th century. Münster still accepted the story of the gold-guarding griffins and many other fabulous tales, but he is hesitant about the monstrous races. [page 184]
In 1557 [Conrad Wolffhart, AKA Lycosthenes] published a large folio with the title Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon, which appeared in the same year in a German translation by J. Herold, the author of the Heydenweldt. This book deals exclusively with marvels all over the earth in chronological order, it is a universal chronicle of monstrosities and wonders. [page 185]
Lycosthenes' work leads away from cosmologies and encyclopaedias and back into the world of magic. The subtitle to each book of the German edition runs: "About the unfathomable wonders of God, which he has created with a particular significance... since the beginning of the world in the form of peculiar creatures, monsters, phenomena in the sky, on the earth and in the sea as an admonition and a horror for mankind." While the Augustinian conception had made the monsters acceptable to the Middle Ages and monuments like the tympanum at Vézelay had given them their due share in the creation, while the later Middle Ages had seen in them similes of human qualities, now in the century of humanism the pagan fear of the monster as a foreboding of evil returns. [page 185]
Previously Sebastian Brant had dedicated to Maximilian his augury about the monstrous sow, born at Landser in 1496, which is so well known through Dürer's 'scientific' engraving. Such extraordinary births were now connected with extraordinary events in the sky, like eclipses of the sun and comets, and linked with the astrological belief in the power of the stars. [page 186]
The famous monster born in Ravenna in 1512 which was never left out in any monster treatise for almost 200 years was commonly regarded as a portent of the devastation of Italy by Louis XII of France. The interpretation of the monster as well as its picture were standardized and accepted by a host of able scholars as above reproach. [page 187]
Most of these prognostications were based on actual or imaginary individual monsters rather than on monstrous races, and therefore seem to lead into a somewhat different field. However, writers saw a genetic link between the individual monsters and the monstrous races. Up to the destruction of the tower of Babel "the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech" (Gen. xi, I), "and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth" (Gen. xi, 9). Only then could the monstrous races originate and by implication also the individual monsters. [page 187]
Jakob Mennel, for instance, in his historical survey of prognostics, shows, among many other portents of the sky, a dog-headed monster which was supposed to have been brought before the emperor Louis the Pious in 814. The creature corresponds exactly to the cynocephali of the monster tradition and the arrangement of the picture with the seated monarch taking stock of the compound being appears to have been derived from illustrations of the Alexander Romance. This monster was for Mennel a sign of the vacillating character of people during that particular epoch. [page 188]
Caspar Bauhin (1560-1624), an anatomist and botanist of great reputation from Basle, who gave in his work on monsters an extremely involved table with all the reasons for monstrous births, ranked the influence of the stars and the winds in addition to the wrath of God above biological causes. [page 190]
Edward Wotton of Oxford (1492-1555) who has been credited with one of the first modern classifications in zoology based on Aristotle, still included in his treatise De differentiis animalibus libri decem (Paris 1552) the monstrous animals from India and Ethiopia and, on the authority of Pliny and Solinus, gave a full account of all the fabulous races. Wotton's Swiss contemporary, the immensely learned Konrad Gesner (1516-1565) was one of the humanists with whom the written word weighed more than experiment and observation. His vast Historia Animalium (Zurich 1551-87) is an encyclopaedia of the zoological material then available, in which, of course, all the legendary animals of classical authors are included. Gesner's zoology enjoyed an enormous success. In England it was first popularized by an abstract arranged by Edward Topsell, which appeared first in 1607 and was re-edited in 1658. The cynocephali, satyrs and sphinxes are ranged under the species ape. A very detailed chapter is devoted to the unicorn and the old subject of the medical use which can be made of its horn. The description of the martikhora still follows Ktesias, while the illustration of it is in line with the pictorial tradition. [pages 190, 191]
Ktesias had compared a tailed race in India with satyrs. Pliny went a step further and located tribes of satyrs in India as well as in Ethiopia and in one case classed them amongst the apes. In this respect he was followed by Solinus who places the satyrs in Ethiopia. Consequently the illustrated Solinus in Milan shows in one picture ape and satyr together. [page 191]
The complicated tradition about satyrs led 16th century writers to attempts at proper classification. Caspar Bauhin, in the beginning of the 17th century, treated this question possibly in greater detail than any other author. He came to the conclusion — anticipated by the Italian miniaturist — that there are two classes of satyrs, real and fictitious ones; both classes have to be divided into subsections. Real satyrs are either men or a species of apes; fictitious satyrs are either poetical or demoniacal. [page 192]
Accurate observation of the native custom of artificial bodily changes like tattooing, enlargement of lips and the lobes of the ears induced [Dr. John Bulwer] to think "that it is an affectation of some race to drown the head in the breast"; and one is not surprised that he visualized this race in its classical shape.
In Schedel's list of monsters appeared the crane-man with enormous neck and long beak (1) whom he had taken over from the Gesta Romanorum. The same monster was published after Schedel with a learned text by Lycosthenes (2), and later by Aldrovandi (3). But as early as 1585 the monster was also presented to the public in an Italian popular pamphlet (4). According to the inscription, based on Lycosthenes' text, it lives in the remotest parts of Africa where this race fights the griffins. [page 193]
A similar pamphlet appeared in Cologne in 1660, and here, characteristically enough, the creature is no more a member of a whole race but an individual monster. Its place of origin is now Madagascar where it is said to have been captured by a captain of Marshal Milleraye. The text goes on to say that it is at present at Nantes and that it will be exhibited in Paris. The imaginary monster, the late degenerate descendant of Homer's, Ktesias' and Megasthenes' mythical fantasies on the East and India has become the show-piece of a fair. [page 194]
Monsters — composite beings, half-human, half-animal — play a part in the thought and imagery of all peoples in all times. Everywhere the monster has been credited with the powers of a god or the diabolical forces of evil. Monsters have had their share in mythologies and fairy-tales, superstitions and prognostications. In the Marvels of the East this old demonic inheritance was at the same time preserved and made pseudo-rational. But their ethnological shadow existence sank back into the sphere of magic whenever the innate awe of the monster came to the fore. The Greeks gave to some of these primeval conceptions visual forms which were generally accepted for 1500 years. They shaped not only the day-dreams of beauty and harmony of western man but created at the same time symbols which expressed the horrors of his real dreams. [page 197]
Spontaneous generation notes from Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler; or, The Contemplative Man's Recreation.
On Land-Frogs:
"...the Land-Frogs are some of them observed by him, to breed by laying eggs; and others to breed of the slime and dust of the earth, and that in Winter they turn to slime again, and that the next Summer that very same slime returns to be a living creature; this is the opinion of Pliny, and Cardanus (in his 19th book De Subtil, ex.) undertaking to give a reason for the raining of frogs: but if it were in my power, it should rain none but Water-Frogs, for those I think are not venomous, especially the right Water-Frog, which about February or March breeds in ditches by slime, and blackish eggs in that slime: about which time of breeding, the he- and she-frogs are observed to use divers summersaults, and to croak and make a noise, which the Land-Frog, or Padock-Frog, never does." [page 109]
More to come.
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