Master Peter Heylyn, geographer, who flourished during the reigns of Charles I., Cromwell, and Charles II., tells us of many marvellous journeys in his volume, and introduces much that is curious in his notes of the natural history of the countries visited. India was in those days an inscrutable and little-known land, where the wildest imagination had full play and was in but little danger of being dispossessed by cold reality. Wonderful, however, as the tales were that came to Heylyn’s ears he found some of them almost beyond credit, and after telling us of “men with dogges heads: of men with one legge onely, of such as live by sent; of men that had but one eye, and that in their foreheads; and of others whose eares did reach unto the ground,” he is careful to add—“But of these relations and the rest of this straine I doubt not but the understanding reader knoweth how to judge and what to believe.” He tells us, too, of an Indian people that by eating dragon’s heart and liver attain to the understanding of the languages of beasts, who can make themselves, when they will, invisible, and who have “two tubbes, whereof the one opened yields winde, and the other raine,” but here, too, he hesitates to take the responsibility of these tales and leaves their credence or rejection to the faith or scepticism of his readers. In the Moluccas, too, he hears of many wonders: a river, for instance, that is plentifully stored with fish, yet the water so hot that it immediately scalds the skin off any beast that is thrown into it; of men with “tayles”; of fruit, that whosoever eateth shall for the space of twelve hours be out of his wits; of “a tree which all the day-time hath not a floure on it, but within half an hour after sunne-set is full of them.” These, however, and several other wonders of the land, he concludes by embracing in one simple category—“All huge and monstrous lies.” He tells of a people of Libya, the Psylli, so venomous in themselves that they could poison a snake! One can fancy the immense disgust of some poisonous reptile of death dealing powers when he found that he had at length met more than his match, and that his attempt on the life of one of these very objectionable Libyans was recoiling with fatal effect upon himself. The America of those days was a very different place from the America of to day. Primeval forest covered much of the land, the red man and the buffalo were in full possession, and the pilgrim fathers had but lately landed on its shores from the little “Mayflower.” As the remote is always associated with the wonderful, and monstrosities and marvels flourish in such congenial soil, Heylyn finds in America no less than in Asia and Africa a rich crop of marvels. Into these we need not, however, go; those who care to seek out this old author will find much of quaint interest, tradition blending with solid history and fable with fact in his pages.