XVI FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



however, great social movements, such as the Crusades and the 

 collapse of Feudalism; great intellectual and emotional movements, 

 such as those of the Renaissance; great inventions, such as that 

 of printing, gave new life to Europe, and zoology shared in the 

 re-awakening. Yet the natural history of the Middle Ages was in 

 great part mystical; fancy and superstition ran riot along paths 

 where science afterwards established order, and, for all practical 

 purposes, the history of zoology, apart from the efforts of a few 

 pioneers, may be said to date from th^ sixteenth century. 



Now, one indubitable factor in the scientific renaissance of the 

 sixteenth century was the enthusiasm of the early travellers, and 

 this stimulus, periodically recurrent, has never failed to have a 

 similar effect — of giving new life to science. But while science, and 

 zoology as a branch of it, has been evolving during the last three 

 centuries, the traveller, too, has shared in the evolution. It is this 

 which we wish to trace. 



I. The Eomantic Type. Many of the old travellers, from 

 Herodotus onwards, were observant and enthusiastic; most were 

 credulous and garrulous. In days when the critical spirit was 

 young, and verification hardly possible, there could not but be a 

 strong temptation to tell extraordinary " travellers' tales " . And 

 they did. Nor need we scoff at them loudly, for the type dies hard; 

 every year such tales are told. 



Oderico de Pordenone and other mediaeval travellers who give 

 some substance to the mythical Sir John de Maundeville were 

 travellers of this genial type. Oderico describes an interesting 

 connecting link between the animal and vegetable kingdom, a 

 literal "zoophyte", the "vegetable lamb", which seems to have 

 been a woolly Scythian fern, with its counterpart in the large fungus 

 which colonials sometimes speak of as the "vegetable sheep". 

 As for the pretended Sir John, he had in his power of swal- 

 lowing marvels a gape hardly less than that of the great snakes 

 which he describes. But even now do we not see his snakes in at 

 least the picture-books on which innocent youth is nurtured ? The 

 basilisk (one of the most harmless of lizards) " sleyeth men beholding 

 it"; the "cocodrilles alfeo sley men" — ^they do indeed — "and eate 



(M70) 



