UNNATURAL HISTORY: ANCIENT 
AND MODERN 
T is one of the most curious facts of history that, 
until quite recently, men, although they noticed 
animals and wrote about them, seem never to 
have taken the least trouble to observe their 
habits. In ancient and medieval times zoological 
writers were perfectly content to rely on hearsay. 
They were not naturalists in any sense of the term. 
They were plagiarists, who did not profess to have even 
seen most of the creatures about which they wrote, 
much less to have observed their habits. Every writer 
in the Middle Ages copied largely from Aristotle and 
Plato, and incorporated in his works every traveller’s 
tale he heard. No story seems to have been too 
childish, no occurrence too improbable, no exaggeration 
too great, no description too grotesque, to be credited 
by medizval zoologists. Their bestiaries are crowded 
with animals that have never lived, while the accounts 
of those which do exist are altogether untrue. 
Take the case of the races of men which, according 
to medizval writers, peopled the various parts of the 
earth. The pigmies first demand our attention. Maunde- 
ville gives a graphic description of them; they are of 
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