THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. OJ 



and in opposition to every law of nature. Those invented or put to- 

 gether by the Greeks are certainly graceful in their composition ; like 

 those arabesques which ornament the remains of some ancient edifices, 

 and which the fertile pencil of Raphael has multiplied : forms are there 

 united, totally repugnant to reason, offering to the eye agreeable pro- 

 portions ; these are the light productions of happy dreams ; perhaps 

 emblems of the oriental taste, in which they pretended to veil beneath 

 mystic imagery the refined suggestions of metaphysics and morals. 

 Let us excuse those who endeavour to employ their time in unravel- 

 ling the wisdom concealed in the Sphynx of Thebes, the Pegasus 

 of Thessaly, the Minotaur of Crete, or the Chimera of Epirus ; but let 

 us hope that no one would seriously seek for them in nature ; as well 

 might we expect to find the animals of Daniel, or the beasts of the 

 Apocalypse. Let us not attempt to seek for the mythological animals 

 of the Persians, offspring of a still more heated imagination ; the mar- 

 tichore, or destroyer of men, which has the head of a man on the body 

 of a lion, terminated by a scorpion's tail* ; the griffin, or treasure- 

 keeper, half eagle half lionf ; the cartazonon\, or wild ass, whose head 

 is armed with a long horn. 



Ctesias, who has described these as existing animals, has passed 

 with many for an inventor of fables, whilst he only attributed a reality 

 to emblematical figures. These fantastic sculptures have been found 

 in the ruins of Persepolis § . What is their meaning ? Most proba- 

 bly we shall never learn, but they certainly do not represent real crea- 

 tures. 



Agatharchides, another fabricator of animals, probably drew from 

 an analogous source. The monuments of Egypt show us still nume- 

 rous combinations of the parts of different species ; the gods are there 

 often represented with a human body and an animal's head ; we see 

 animals with human heads, which have produced the cynocephali, the 

 sphynxes, and the satyrs of ancient naturalists. The custom of de- 

 picting in the same painting men of different heights, the king or the 

 conqueror gigantic, the conquered or people three or four times smaller, 

 may have given birth to the story of the pigmies. It is in some re- 

 cess of one of these monuments that Agatharchides must have seen 

 his carnivorous bull, whose mouth, cleft to his ears, spared no other 



* Plin. viii, 31 ; Arist. lib. ii, cap. 11 ; Phot. Bibl. art. 72 ; Ctes. Indie ; ^Elian, 

 Anim. iv, 21. 



T ^Elian, Anim. iv, 27. 



X Id. xvi. 20 ; Phottus Bibl. art. 72"; Ctes. Indie. 



§ See Corneille Lebrun, Voyage en Muscovy, en Perse, et aux Indes, t. ii ; and 

 the German work of M. Heeren on the Commerce of the Ancients. 



