It is in the smaller initials of Gering and Rembolt that we have some of the best examples, as far as historiated letters are concerned, of those compound animals so often met with in the ornamentation of the fifteenth century. If we look at the records of antiquity, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Roman medals and pottery, and other artistic remains, it will be seen that from a very early time it was considered humorous to represent animals carrying on the occupations of men, or doing the duties of other animals. By a natural extension of this idea, men were depicted in the roles of animals who had usurped their supremacy, and who are represented as treating their tyrant in the way that they themselves were accustomed to be treated. Wright and Champfleury in their Histories of Caricature have given numerous examples. In an Egyptian papyrus, a cat is seen walking erect and driving a flock of geese, a fox is carrying a basket and playing the flute, and the lion and the unicorn are playing at chess. In a thirteenth-century tile, a rabbit going a-hunting is riding his hereditary foe the dog, and in a manuscript of the fourteenth, a dog with his paws tied is being conveyed in a cart drawn by two rabbits and led by a third, towards a hill on which a gallows has been prepared for him. In a carving of the same period, another example of ‘the world turned upside down,’ four geese are shown hanging their old enemy the fox. Roman statuettes still exist, in which the personages represented are satirised by their heads being replaced by those of animals, such as rats or wolves. These fancies, which are said to have come from Greece, led to the creation of such beings as the Sphinx, the most celebrated of the compound animals of antiquity, and later on to the Chimerae and Grylli, which were the predecessors of the innumerable fantastic hybrids that the imaginations of the artists of the Middle Ages called into existence. These creatures have already been represented in our Lyons initials. In one of Saccon’s letters there is a kind of armadillo with a human head, and amongst the reproductions from the _Regimen Sanitatis_ there are two copied from Gering and Rembolt originals, which are also given. In these latter the R, with a monster with a neck ending in a human head, is particularly noticeable, as it occurs frequently in the borders of the same printers, and the Books of Hours of other presses. It is to be remarked that the belief in the existence of these unnatural monsters was quite general. Wright quotes Giraldus Cambrensis as describing animals in Ireland, some half bulls, half men, others half stags, half cows, others half monkeys, half dogs. The dog-faced monkeys had always been worshipped in Egypt, and for this reason possibly had become an object of suspicion to the mediæval clergy, who made them figure as devils both in church architecture and manuscript decoration. It is in this rôle that they are constantly represented in woodcut initials.