When the first dromedary made its appearance in Germany, a circular containing a primitive woodcut invited old and young to see “the curious animal called Romdarius.” Fifty miles it could run in one day in the sand sea--i.e., desert--the text said, and in summer it could live three months without drinking “ohne sauffen.” This last-mentioned quality seemed to predestine the animal to a temperance sign, but fortunately the description added, “when it drinks it drinks much at one time,” and so the tavern-keepers did not hesitate to adopt it as a tavern sign. As an example we might quote the inn “Zum Kameeltier” in Strassburg. Somewhat later, in the first half of the seventeenth century, “The Crocodile” appears over the tavern door in Antwerp, and this reminds us of the stuffed animals in the pharmacy described by Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet”:-- “And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, An alligator stuff’d, and other skins Of ill-shap’d fishes.” The zebra seems to have been known quite early if we are allowed to take “The Striped Donkey” as such. In the inn “L’Ane rayé” at Rheims, the father of Joan of Arc is reported to have lodged when he came to see the coronation in 1429. One of the last comers of the curious and rare animals was the giraffe; it appeared in Paris for the first time in 1827, and was immediately adopted as a tavern sign by a host in Étampes, near the capital. The “enseigne” represented “le dit animal conduit par un Bédouin.” But the most curious animals of creation did not suffice. The imagination of the people created others still more strange and the landlords put these fabulous beasts on their signs too: the unicorn, the dragon, the siren. “The Siren” tavern in Lyons at the time of the Renaissance was evidently a very attractive place which the traveler found very hard to leave again, because, as a contemporary tells us, “il s’y trouve des Sirènes.” In later days, when the popular stories were forgotten, the sirens were changed to “Six Reines,” the six queens. In another chapter we shall see how Keats in his poem, The Mermaid, has celebrated one of these old Siren taverns. How deeply rooted in the old days was this belief in “Mörwonder” or ill-shaped fishes and malformations of the human figure will appear at a glance in Schedel’s “Welt Chronik” printed by Koberger in Nuremberg in 1493, where we see them in strange woodcuts before us: the man with ears hanging to the ground and other misshaped creatures.