In the study of our subject during the Middle Ages, several sources of information are open to us. Of hooks on natural history, pure and simple, there are none; their day was not yet. The love of nature for its own sake was a later birth, but the books of travels often detail the zoology and botany of the lands journeyed through. Then there are the medical books, containing the most extraordinary remedies, or perhaps it would be safer to say, prescriptions, for the ills of suffering humanity, and which more or less fully describe the source and origin of the various ingredients in their gruesome pharmacopœia, and with these we may class the books on social economics, dealing with gastronomy, gardening, the distillation of essences, and so forth, and which necessarily deal in some degree with the life-history of the materials that are introduced. In addition to these we have what are termed bestiaries, books that treat the animals and plants as so many lay figures to be clothed upon with any moral that, with often scant regard to facts, will serve to enforce a dogma. To these must be added the armories or books on heraldry, where the lions, elephants, bears, and other devices of blazonry, are often very quaintly and graphically described for the benefit of those, doubtless a considerable majority, to whom they were little more than a name; or to whom, if they had seen them at the Tower of London in the royal collection, further information on creatures so strange was of great interest. In addition to these sources of instruction of more or less value we may fitly refer to the writings of the poets, since in the pages of Chaucer, Shakespeare and the lesser lights of poesy are abundant allusions to the beliefs of the time, in this as in other directions, and many of these are of great interest and value. “Oh for a booke and a shady nooke Eyther in doore or out, With the greene leaves whispering overhead, Or the streete cryes all about; Where I maie reade all at my ease, Both of the newe and old, For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke Is better to me than golde.”[8] It must surely have been of some quaint book of travel that this old English song-writer was thinking when he thus discoursed on the pleasant debt we owe to books, when in the stirring days of Frobisher, Drake and Raleigh, men’s minds were expanding to all sorts of possibilities, and they read with avidity of the Eldorado of the west, and of the headless men, or those whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. Such as were in all good faith held to be fairly represented by our illustration (fig. 1) from one of these old books. The writers of the day described too the wondrous creatures that peopled the torrid plains of Africa or India, or the lands of Prester John, or far Cathay; where so many things were new and true and wonderful that it seemed as if all things were possible, and a mermaid no more an unreasonable probability than a milkmaid.