LEAVES FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A NATURALIST. 



Apres tous ceux-ci venoient Dythican, qui e"toit 

 d'une aunede long, mais il avoit seulement le corps 

 d'une oiseau, qui est la perdrix : il avoit seulement 

 tout le col verd et mouchete ou ombrage*. 



Were it not for the green neck and the bizarre 

 quality of the plumage, we have here the very 

 familiar that tripped along at the feet of Charles 

 V. Titian has immortalized both.* 



Le derniers fut Drac, avec quatre pieds fort 

 courts, jaune et verd, le corps par-dessus flambant 

 brun, comme du feu bleu, et sa queue rougedtre. 



This last grovelling spirit must have been the 

 red-tape devil of the party. 



Ces sept avec Belial, qui sont ces conseillers 

 d'entretien, etoient ainsi habillez de couleurs et 

 facons, quiont etc recitees. 



Then came a rabble of fiends, some in the shapes 

 of unknown creatures ; others less ambitious, taking 

 the forms of frogs, fallow deer, red deer, bears, 

 wolves, apes, hares, buffaloes, horses, goats, boar- 

 pigs, and the like ; but are they not pictured in 

 the fearful nightmare of Walpurgis night, by the 

 hand of Retszch, under the inspiration of Goethe? 



We must lay down this fascinating old book, f 

 even though we shut it in the face of our reader, 

 albeit the indomitable Faust, no whit abashed, bids 

 his friend " go on ;" and stands undaunted the 

 infernal battle wherein all these diabolical forms 

 eat each other up, after changing to as many shapes 

 as the princess in the Arabian story, without even 

 leaving their tails, to say nothing of a plague of 

 insects which afterwards comes upon him and 

 drives him almost mad ; till bitten, stung, and 

 blistered, all over by the vilest vermin, he leaves 

 the enchanted atmosphere of Belial and his study 

 not beaten, mind you and, coming forth into 

 the blessed air of nature, finds that it is all a dia- 

 bolical delusion, and that hks skin is unsullied by 

 a single insect, parasitic or predatory. 



When Faust has Mephlstopheles, thereafter, 

 assigned to him, what adventures ! But we must 

 not be tempted further, though Alexander the 

 Great himself is made to appear to the emperor, 

 Charles V., as vividly as the phantoms to the " De- 

 formed transformed," upon the adjuration of the 

 Stranger to the 



Demons heroic 



Demons who wore, 

 The form of the Stoic 



Or Sophist of yore 

 Or the shape of each victor 



From Macedon's boy. 



But we must leave the magic land of apparitions 

 for the realities. of nature, and introduce such of 

 our readers as feel inclined to the introduction, to 

 the other pachydermatous form, which we hope 

 soon to behold alive in the flesh, the "Innog 

 noTauiog of the Greeks. 



What an uncouth form it is, propped upon four 



* In his full-length portrait of the emperor, with a tame 

 partridge at his feet. 



tHistoire prodigieuse et lamentable de JEAN FAUST, 

 Grand Magician, avec son testament, et sa vie epouvant- 

 able. A Cologne, chez les Heritiers de Pierre Marteau. 



19 



short huge legs, looking like a gigantic wine-skin 

 fit for the revels of Polyphemus ! 



" The Hippopotamus" are there not more than 

 one species? 



That there are several fossil species* there is no 

 doubt ; but whether more than one species now 

 exists is a vexed question. 



M. Desmoulins names two Hippopotamus Ca- 

 pensis, and H. Senegalensis resting his distinction, 

 as he says, on osteological discrepancies as strong 

 as those on which Cuvier depended, when he 

 separated the great fossil hippopotamus from the 

 recent species exhibited at the Cape. Nay, M. 

 Desmoulins goes further, not only expressing an 

 opinion that it is not impossible that the hippopot- 

 amus of the Nile differs from the two above men- 

 tioned, but hinting that there may be two species 

 in that river. The difference of color observed by 

 M. Caillaud, who found among forty hippopotami 

 living in the Upper Nile two or three of a bluish- 

 black hue, while the rest were reddish, seems to 

 be the foundation on which M. Desmoulins built 

 his last-named suggestion. But color is often a 

 treacherous guide when specific character is the 

 question ; and, to say nothing of differences due to 

 sex and age, the alteration of color in the same 

 individual when its skin is dry, when it is moist, 

 and when the river horse is taking his subaqueous 

 walk, has been remarked by more than one observer. 

 Le Vaillant, for instance, watched the progress of 

 one at the bottom of Great river, from the top of 

 an elevated rock which advanced into the stream, 

 and he remarked, that its color which is grayish 

 when the animal is dry, and bluish when the skin 

 is only moist as it walked along under the water, 

 appeared to be of a deep blue. After the French 

 traveller had satisfied his curiosity by looking over 

 'iis unconscious peripatetic, as a certain personage 

 hot to be named to ears polite is said to look over 

 Lincoln, he watched the moment when it came to 

 the surface to breathe, and killed it with a well- 

 directed bullet, to the great joy of his Hottentots, 

 who, in their surprise at the feat, and delight at 

 the size of the beast, called it, " The grandmother 

 of the river." 



In its osteological organization, the hippopota- 

 mus approaches, in some degree, that of the ox 

 and the hog. The skull, especially, exhibits 

 much similarity in the connection of its bones, and 

 the figure of its sutures, to that of the Sui'dae ; 

 but, at the same time, it bears the impress of its 

 own peculiarity. 



The teeth are very remarkable, and, especially 

 the molars, vary much in form, number and posi- 

 tion, according to the growth and age of the ani- 

 mal. The long subcylindrical incisors and ca- 

 nines the latter being enormous tusks terminating 

 in a sharpened edge, which reminds the observer 

 of that of a chisel of the lower jaw, give a ter- 

 rific aspect to the mouth when it is open. This 

 tremendous apparatus, formed principally for teas- 

 ing and bruising more than grinding, is a fit 



* Hippopotami major, minutus, mediiis, for example. 



