56 ONT THE REVOLUTIONS OF 



animal*; but surely naturalists will not assert that there can be 

 such ; for nature never unites either cloven feet or horns with cutting 

 teeth. 



There were most probably other figures equally strange, either in 

 those monuments which were not able to withstand the ravages of 

 time, or in those temples of Ethiopia and Arabia which the Mahome- 

 dans and Abyssinians, in the excess of their religious zeal, have de- 

 stroyed. Those of India swarm with them ; but the combinations are 

 too extravagant to deceive any one : monsters wdth a hundred arms, 

 and twenty different heads, are too monstrous to find belief. 



It is not the Japanese and Chinese only w T ho have not the imagi- 

 nary animals which they represent as real, and even exhibit in their 

 religious books ; the Mexicans have them also : it is the custom of all 

 people, either at the time when their idolatry has not become suffi- 

 ciently refined, or when the meaning of these emblematical combina- 

 tions have been lost. But who will pretend to find in nature these 

 offsprings of ignorance and superstition ? 



Certain travellers, however, anxious to establish a character of re- 

 nown, have asserted that they have seen these fantastic animals, or 

 that, for want of due attention, and deceived by a slight resemblance, 

 they have taken real creatures for them. Large apes have appeared 

 real cynocephali : baboons, as men wdth tails ; and thus St. Augustin 

 said that he had seen a satyr. 



Some real animals, scarcely seen and badly described, may have 

 caused these monstrous ideas, slightly founded on reality. Thus we 

 cannot doubt the existence of the hyena, though this animal has not 

 a neck supported by one single bone f , and that he does not change 

 sex every year, as Pliny J says ; thus perhaps the carnivorous bull is 

 only a rhinoceros with his two horns. M. de Weltheim asserts, that 

 the auriferous ants of Herodotus are corsacs. 



One of the most famous amongst the animals of the ancients is the 

 unicorn. Naturalists were fully bent, even down to our times, on 



* Photius Bibl. art. 250 ; Agatharchid. Excerpt. Hist. cap. xxxix ; ^Elian, xvii, 

 35 ; Plin. viii, 21. 



•j- I have seen, in the cabinet of the late M. Adrian Camper, a hyena's skeleton, 

 in which many of the vertebrae of the neck were soldered together. It is probable 

 that it is some similar individual which has caused this character to be given to all 

 hyenas. This animal must be more subject to this accident than any other, in con- 

 sequence of the prodigious force of its neck, and the frequent use it makes of it. 

 When the hyena has seized any thing, it is easier to draw it along than to tear from 

 it what it holds : this is why the Arabs have selected it as the emblem of insuperable 

 obstinacy. 



J It does not change the sex ; but has at the perinseum an orifice which has given 

 rise to the opinion of its being an hermaphrodite. 



