It is impossible to mention a tithe of the strange facts got together by the industry of the men of science of the past; sometimes introducing to our notice the most extraordinary creatures, at others presenting the most ordinary creatures in an extraordinary way. What can we say, for instance, of the Catoblepas, a beast bred in Lybia, “a fearful and terrible beast to look upon”? His eyes “very fierie, as it were of a bloudie colour, and he never useth to look directly forward, nor upward, but always down to the earth.” He has a long mane and cloven feet, and his body covered with scales. “As for his meat, it is deadly and poysonfull herbes, and he sendeth forth a horrible breath which poysoneth the aire over his head and about him, inasmuch that such creatures as draw in the breath of that aire are grievously afflicted, and losing both voice and sight, they fall into deadly convulsions.” What shall we say of the Oryges, the only beast in creation that has his hair growing reversed and turning towards the head? Or of the Lomie in the forests of Bohemia, “which hath hanging under its neck a Bladder always full of scalding water, with which, when she is hunted, she so tortureth the Dogs that she thereby maketh her escape”? Or of the wonderful Eale of Ethiopia as large as a hippopotamus, and having horns that he can incline backwards or forwards at any angle to suit the exigencies of conflict? Or of the Manticora, having the face of a man and the body of a lion, and voice like the blending of flute and of trumpet? Or of fifty other creatures equally extraordinary? It is painful to think that such stories were deliberate inventions, and that knaves devised them and fools accepted them; and we must, we believe, conclude that almost every story had a grain of truth in it, but that the love of the marvellous, the tendency to exaggeration, the change that took place as the story travelled, and received almost unconsciously here an additional graphic touch and there a little more fully developed detail, made the fully matured statement an entirely different thing to the modest seed from which it sprang.