horses, wild men, men with horns, one-eyed, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, and pygmies; it is the home, too, of the phœnix, and of nearly all living animals. In one of our lands, hight Zone, are worms called in our tongue salamanders. These worms can only live in fire, and they build cocoons like silkworms, which are unwound by the ladies of our palace and spun into cloth and dresses, which are worn by our Exaltedness. These dresses, when we would wash them and clean, are cast into flames.” Browne, in his exposure of vulgar errors, gravely denies the existence of wool on a salamander at all, truly pointing out that “it is a kinde of Lizard, a quadruped corticated and depilous, that is, without woolle, furre, or haire,” an altogether hopeless animal to shear. Porta mentions that some peculiar creatures called “Pyragones be generated in the fire: certain little flying beasts so called because they live and are nourished in the fire, and yet they fly up and down in the air. This is strange; but that is more strange, that as soon as ever they come out of the fire into any cold air presently they die.” Porta of course uses the word presently in the older sense of at this present moment, so that it really is, as he says, a wonder that these creatures are able to fly about in the air, when its effect upon them is immediate death. We have ourselves been gravely told that if the fires at the great iron-works in the Midland Counties were not occasionally extinguished an uncertain but fearful something would be generated in them, and it seems only natural that after the imagination has peopled earth and sea with strange monsters, and placed in the upper regions of the air the paradise-birds and other creatures that derived all needful sustenance from that element alone, that the remaining element, fire, should also have its peculiar inhabitants and monsters. The chamæleon was for centuries supposed to live only on air, while its property of changing colour under the influence of its surroundings was greatly exaggerated. Shakespeare, the great storehouse of mediæval folk-lore, makes Speed, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, exclaim:— “Tho’ the chamæleon Love can live on the air, I’m one that am nourish’d by my victuals,” while Gloster, in King Henry VI., boasts that he could “add colours to the chamæleon.” Gower, in like manner, asserts that vainglory is “Lich unto the Camelion Whiche upon every sondry hewe That he beholt he mote newe His colour.” Hence, again, other moralists declare that men and women inconstant and fickle are like unto chamæleons.