Marshal Laverdin in the year 1599 was hunting in the province of Maine, when his attendants came in sight of a peasant who, instead of waiting to pay his obeisance to their master, fled from them. They pursued and overtook him; and as he did not uncover to salute the Marshal, they plucked off his cap, and discovered that he had a horn growing on his head. François Trouillu was this poor man's name, and he was then aged thirty-four years: the horn began to sprout when he was about seven years old; it was shaped almost like that of a ram, only the flutings were straight instead of spiral, and the end bowed inwards toward the cranium. The fore part of his head was bald, and his beard red and tufted, such as painters bestow upon Satyrs. He had retired to the woods hoping to escape exposure there, and there he wrought in the coal-pits. Marshal Laverdin took possession of him as he would of a wild beast, and sent him as a present to Henry IV; and that King, with even more inhumanity than the Marshal, bestowed him upon somebody who carried him about as a show. Mezeray, who relates this without any comment upon the abominable tyranny of the Marshal and the King, concludes the story by saying “the poor man took it so much to heart to be thus led about like a bear and exposed to the laughter and mockery of his fellow creatures, that he very soon died.” Blumenbach says “it has been ascertained by chemical analysis that such horns have a greater affinity in their composition with the horns of the rhinoceros than of any other animal.” It may be so; but the short and straight horns were stunted in their growth; their natural tendency was to twist like a sheep's horn;—and the habit of cornification is more likely to have been formed nearer home than in the interior of Africa. The first rope-dancer, or as Johnson would have called him ‘funambulist,’ the Doctor said, had been a monkey; the first fellow who threw a somerset, a tumbler pigeon. The Oneirocrites, or Oneirologists, as they who pretended to lay down rules for the interpretation of dreams called themselves, say that if any one dreams he has the head of a horse on his shoulders instead of his own, it betokens poverty and servitude. The Doctor was of opinion that it presaged nothing, but that it bore a retrospective interpretation, being the confused reminiscence of a prior state. Amateur thieves,—for there are persons who commit petty larcenies with no other motive than the pleasure of stealing,—he supposed to have been tame magpies or jackdaws. And in the vulgar appellation which is sometimes bestowed upon an odious woman, he thought that though there was not more meant than meets the ear, there was more truth conveyed than was intended. A dramatist of Charles the First's reign, says, 'Tis thought the hairy child that's shown about Came by the mother's thinking on the picture Of Saint John Baptist, in his camel's coat.