Another potent influence with the older writers was the delight in what is abnormal and wonderful, and here again a ready credulity found ample material. The love of the marvellous is deeply engraved in human nature. We may see abundant proof of this in such classic myths as the Sirens, in the monstrous forms carved or depicted in the temples of Egypt or Mexico, in the popularity of such books as the Arabian Nights’ Tales, or the adventures of Gulliver or Munchausen down to the fearful joy of the youngsters in the nursery in the sanguinary giant whose food was the blood of Englishmen. “Far away in the twilight time Of every people, in every clime, Dragons and griffins and monsters dire, Born of water, or air, or fire, Crawl and wriggle and foam with rage, Through dark tradition and ballad age.” The fell harpies, the monstrous roc, the death-dealing basilisk, the phœnix, the chimæra, the monstrous kraken, the deadly cockatrice, the fire-drake, dragon, half-man half-fish, the vulture-headed Nisroch, the treacherous Lorelei, sweet Queen Mab of Fairyland, fiery dragons, ghastly wehr-wolves, mermaids, centaurs, together with the great sea-serpent, the toad embedded for countless centuries in the rock, and other wonders that still turn up from time to time during the dull season in the newspapers, are but a few examples that at once occur to one’s thoughts. Ovid and Pliny in their day went to very considerable lengths to satisfy this love of the marvellous; in the Middle Ages writers not a few discoursed of dog-headed men, of pigmies, of “the anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,” while no country fair in this present year of grace would be considered by its patrons at all up to date unless it included a giant and a dwarf, together with a two-headed calf, or some such monstrosity. The writings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other poets abound in allusions to the folk-lore of the time. Thus in the lines— “When beggars die there are no comets seen, The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes,” we have an interesting reference to the old belief that all things, terrestrial or celestial, were created for the service of man and were profitable in some way or other to him. Much of the early medical treatment was a strange mixture of astrological, zoological and botanical lore. Thus Chaucer tells us of his Doctour of Phisik that— “In al this world ne was ther non him lyk To speke of phisik and of surgerye: For he was grounded in astronomye.” Not only did he put his trust in “drugges and letuaries,” but— “He kepte his pacient wonderfully wel In houres by his magik naturel. Wel coude be fortunen the ascendent Of his ymages for his pacient.”