THEORY OF THE EARTH. 89 



quired some degree of refinement. But is there 

 any one who could possibly pretend to discover, 

 amidst the realities of animal nature, what are thus 

 so plainly the productions of ignorance and super- 

 stition? And yet some travellers, influenced by a 

 desire to make themselves famous, have gone so 

 far as to pretend that they saw these fancied be- 

 ings; or, deceived by a slight resemblance, into 

 which they were too careless to inquire, they have 

 identified these with creatures that actually exist. 

 In their eyes, large baboons, or monkeys, have be- 

 come cynocephali, and sphinxes, real men w r ith long 

 tails. It is thus that St. Augustin imagined he had 

 seen a satyr. 



Real animals, observed and described with equal 

 inaccuracy, may have given rise to some of these 

 ideal monsters. Thus, we can have no doubt of 

 the existence of the hyena, although the back of 

 this animal be not supported by a single bone, and 

 although it does not change its sex yearly, as al- 

 leged by Pliny. Perhaps the carnivorous bull may 

 only have been the two-horned rhinoceros, falsely 

 described. M. de Weltheim considers the auri- 

 ferous ants of Herodotus as the corsacs* of modern 

 naturalists. 



* ' ' v- 



The most famous among these fabulous animals 

 of the ancients was the unicorn. Its real existence 



* The Korsake, or Corsac fox of Pallas and Pennant Transl. 



12 



