THEORY OF THE EARTH. 73 



they are the fashion among all nations, whether 

 at the periods when their idolatry has not yet been 

 refined, or when the import of these emblematical 

 combinations has been lost. But who would dare 

 to affirm that he had found those productions of 

 ignorance and superstition in nature ? And yet it 

 may have happened that travellers, influenced by 

 a desire of making themselves famous, might pre- 

 tend that they had seen those strange beings, or 

 that, deceived by a slight resemblance, into which 

 they were too careless to enquire, they may have 

 taken real animals for them. In the eyes of such 

 people, large baboons or monkeys may have ap- 

 peared true cynocephali, sphinxes, or men with 

 tails. It is thus that St Augustin may have ima- 

 gined he had seen a satyr. 



Some real animals, inaccurately observed and 

 described, may have given rise to monstrous ideas, 

 which, however, have had their foundation in some 

 reality. Thus, we can have no doubt of the ex- 

 istence of the hyena, although that animal has not 

 its neck supported by a single bone *, and al- 



* I have even seen, in the collection of the late Mr Ad- 

 drien Camper, a skeleton of a hyena, in which several of the 

 vertebrae of the neck were anchylosed. It was probably 

 from seeing some similar individual that the character in 

 question was attributed to all hyenas. This animal ought 

 to be more subject than any other to such an accident, on 



