"Tortoises, when turned on their backs, will sometimes fetch deep sighs and shed abundance of tears. "A humming-bird and nest, said to weigh but twelve grains; his feathers are set in gold, and sell at a great rate. "A bone, said to be taken out of a mermaid's head. "The largest whale--liker an island than an animal. "The white shark, which sometimes swallows men whole. "A siphalter, said with its sucker to fasten on a ship and stop it under sail. "A stag-beetle, whose horns, worn in a ring, are good against the cramp. "A mountain cabbage--one reported 300 feet high." The author of "Hudibras," who died in 1680, attacked the Royal Society for experiments that seemed to him futile and frivolous, in a severe and bitter poem, entitled, "The Elephant in the Moon," the elephant proving to be a mouse inside a philosopher's telescope. The poem expresses the current opinion of the society, on which King Charles II. is once said to have played a joke. In 1726-27 Swift, too, had his bitter jeer at the society. In Laputa, he thus describes the experimental philosophers:-- "The first man I saw," he says, "was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. He told me he did not doubt that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me 'to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.' I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them. I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder, who likewise showed me a treatise he had written concerning the 'Malleability of Fire,' which he intended to publish.