1885-1886. 443 



The fictitious beings used as symbols in heraldry may be 

 divided into two classes — i. Celestial beings mentioned in Holy 

 Writ and those creatures of the imagination which, from the 

 earliest ages, have held possession of men's minds, profound 

 symbols unlike anything in the heavens above or in the earth 

 beneath or in the waters under the earth. It may be an ab- 

 stract idea embodied in tangible shape, such as the terrible 

 creature, the type of some divine quality, that stands calm, 

 immovable, and imperishable within the walls of our National 

 Museum ; such forms as the dragon, of the purely imaginative 

 class, and those creatures compounded of parts of diiferent 

 real animals, yet unlike any one of them, each possessing 

 special symbolic attributes, according to the traditional ideas 

 held concerning them. 2. Animals purely heraldic, such as the 

 Unicorn, Heraldic Tiger, Panther incensed, Heraldic Antelope, 

 &c., owe their origin and significance to other ideas, and must 

 be accounted for on other grounds — namely, the mistaken ideas 

 resulting from imperfect knowledge of these objects in natural 

 history by early writers and herald painters, to whom they were, 

 no doubt, real animals with natural qualities, and, as such, ac- 

 cording to their knowledge they depicted them ; and although 

 more light had been thrown upon the study of natural history 

 since their time, and which has proved so many of their con- 

 ceptions to be erroneous, the well-known heraldic shapes of 

 many of these liisus 7iaturce are still retained in modern ar- 

 mory. These animals were such as they could have had little 

 chance of seeing, and they probably accepted their descriptions 

 from "travellers' tales" — always full of the marvellous — and the 

 misleading histories of still earlier writers. Pliny and many of 

 the writers of his day describe certain animals in a way that 

 appears the absurdest fable ; even the lion described by him is 

 in some points most unnatural. Xenophon, for instance, 

 describing a boar hunt, gravely tells us — *' So hot are the boar's 

 tusks when he is just dead, that if a person lays hairs upon 

 them the hairs will shrivel up, and when the boar is alive they 

 —that is, the tusks — are actually red hot when he is irritated, 



