A learned Jesuit, Conrad Lycosthenes, published an elaborate work in 1557 under the title =Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon= (Basel) in which he put together all miracles, miraculous happenings and strange phenomena from the creation of the world down to his days. This is only one of a number of compilations of this character, the significant feature of which is the jumbling together into one class, of miracles, of unusual phenomena in the heavens and on earth, of the birth of malformations--human or animal--including monstrosities and fanciful hybrid creatures,--all being viewed as signs sent by a divine power. Lycosthenes includes in his compilation the accounts of ancient writers and later travellers of peoples of remarkable formation such as the Scipodes and Monomeri (10) of whom Pliny[239] reports that they have only one foot, of people who have the heads of dogs (11), of others living in Western Ethiopia (8) who have four eyes, of the Ipopodes in Asia (8) who have the feet of horses, and of the Scythians (ib.) who have only one eye, or of people have no heads, of others with eyes, nose and mouth on the breast (9), or who have six arms, (14) or who are provided with hoofs and horns, or of women (13) who lay their young in the form of eggs. Lycosthenes' work is elaborately illustrated and so he portrays for us these strange beings, as well as men with the heads of dogs (11), hippocentaurs (12), men with six arms (14), baldheaded women with beards, and people in the region of the North Sea who have ears that cover the whole body (13), mermaids, tritons, satyrs, fauns (10, 28, 218, 311, 317) and harpies (31). The whole army of fabulous beings of mythology and folk-lore is brought before us[240], including the remarkable creature whom Gessner in his great work on Animals[241] describes as 'a virgin with human face, arms and hands, body of a dog, wings of a bird, claws of a lion and the tail of a dragon'. Naive credulity =alone= would be insufficient to account for such fancies, but if we start from the deep impression made by malformations of all kinds from the point of view of birth-omen divination, the exaggeration of such malformations through the play of the imagination would follow from the inherent fondness of human nature for the marvellous. A large part of Lycosthenes' work is taken up with the malformations and monstrosities mentioned in classical writers--Pliny, Livy, Cicero, Valerius Maximus, Julius Obsequens, Aelian, etc. which he has collected with great patience. Passing beyond classical days, he is at equal pains to put together all records of unusual phenomena, adding generally the attendant circumstances or the events that followed, which the sign was regarded as portending. All kinds of monstrosities are described, together with the date and the place of their appearance. A lamb with a swine's head (136), born in Macedonia presaged the war with Phillip which soon thereafter broke out. A double-headed ox