Amongst other strange specimens of humanity that we encounter in the pages of Maundevile, if not in the flesh, are the peculiarly strange “folk that gon upon hire Hondes and hire Feet as Bestes,[18] and thei ben all skynned and fedred, and thei lepen als lightly in to Trees and fro Tree to Tree as it were Squyrelles.” In one district the people subsist chiefly on adders, partly because there is “gret plentee” of them, but more especially from appreciation. “Thei eten them at gret sollempnytees, and he that makethe there a Feste, be it nevere so costifous, and he han no Neddres, he hathe no thanke for his travaylle.” It would in fact be a parallel atrocity to a gathering of the City Fathers at the Mansion House and no turtle soup provided. The long-headed people that formed part of the strange African fraternity we may reasonably conclude to have owed their peculiarity to the habit of employing pressure to mould the head into the compressed and elongated form, in just the same way that in recent times the heads of some of the tribes of North American Indians were manipulated. We may not unreasonably conclude, too, that some at least of the various curious people referred to by the ancient and mediæval writers were but accidental monstrosities, malformations of rare or casual occurrence. Such an one appearing amongst strangers would be regarded with great curiosity, and it would be but a short step farther to the lover of the marvellous to assume that somewhere or other in the region from whence he sprang, was a whole tribe or nation of such. The accidental resemblances, too, that we sometimes see in the human physiognomy to animals would be suggestive material to those in search of the wonderful. Porta’s book, “De Humana Physiognomonica,” gives many illustrations of heads, animal and human, showing resemblance of the men’s heads to those of the owl, lion, ox, and other creatures. Some of these are very clever, while others are absurdly forced and exaggerated. Munster, under the section De mirabilibus et monstrosis creaturis quæ in interioribus Africæ inueniuntur, gives a picture in his book, where our old friend the man with the single immense foot, the one-eyed man, a two-headed fellow, the headless man with his eyes and other features in his chest,[19] whose acquaintance we have made in fig. 1, and a wolf-headed man, are all grouped together as a matter of course, leaving the observer to conclude that anyone strolling through Central Africa would any day expect to come across such a gathering. The classic myth of the centaur crops up again in the mediæval Ipotayne. These “dwellen somtymes in the Watre and somtyme on the Lond, and thei ben half Man and half Hors, and thei eten men[20] whan thei may take hem.” Pliny writes of the Ægipanæ, half beasts, “shaped as you see them commonly painted,” a terse description that may have been amply sufficient for his original readers, but which leaves later generations considerably in the dark.