[11] Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was a celebrated Portuguese navigator, who published a description of his travels of so marvellous a nature that his name became a synonym for extravagant fiction. We meet with him, for instance, in Congreve’s play of “Love for Love,” where the passage occurs: “Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude.” [12] “Beefe is a good meate for an Englysshe man, so be it the beest be yonge, and that it be not kowe-flesshe: for olde beefe and kowe-flesshe doth ingender melancholye and leperouse humoures. Yf it be moderatly powderyd, that the groose blode by salte may be exhaustyd it doth make an Englysshe man stronge.”—_Andrew Boorde’s “Dyetary.”_ [13] There can be little question but that the ancient fictions of satyrs, cynocephali and other supposed monstrous forms of humanity arose in vague accounts of different species of apes. [14] “Marking the tracts of air, the clamorous cranes Wheel their due flight in varied ranks descried; And each with outstretched neck his rank maintains In marshalled order through the ethereal void.” [15] The word is spelt sometimes as pigmy, and at others as pygmy; the latter is the more correct, as the word is from the Greek name for them, the pygmaioi. [16] These great anthropoid apes are found in the forests that extend southward for a thousand miles or so from the gulf of Guinea. The gorilla is not found beyond this limit. [17] Burton probably got this notion from Megasthenes, an old writer who, not to be outdone in the introduction of the marvellous, tells us of a nation in the extreme East of India that are wholly mouthless, and that live only by the smells that they draw in at their nostrils, partaking of no food whatever, but flourishing on the pleasant odours given off by various roots, blossoms, and fruits that they are careful to carry about with them when travelling. Unfortunately, if the scent be too strong it deprives them of life and they die as effectually of a surfeit of good things as the famous British sovereign who overdid his devotion to lamprey stew. [18] These doubtless would be some of the larger apes, that, sufficiently human in general form to suggest the notion of a man, drop upon their fore-paws and travel across the open spaces of the forest as quadrupeds. [19] “Who would believe that there were mountaineers, Dewlapped like bulls, whose throats had hanging at them Wallets of flesh? Or that there were such men Whose heads stood in their breasts?” GONZALE _in the “Tempest.”_