LIFE-FOKM llsr ATIT. 



297 



iiig an animal which is of unknown habits with functions in harmony with those 

 famiHar to the wi'iter. The wah'us and elephant tusks, and the saw-fish's maxillae 

 doubtless found their way to European museums long before the illiterate traders 

 who brought them, could give any other accounts than those into which their 

 imagination largely entered. The naturalist would draw the tusks of the walrus 

 and elephant in the position of the wild boar, the only animal he had ever seen which 

 possessed such appendages. 



Akin to the above are the numerous examples which crowd the zoological 

 record of errors of identification of actual forms. For the explanation of the fact 

 that Aldrovandus* described the shriveled skin of a plagiostomatous fish as the 

 remains of a dragon (Fig. 24), we have only to look over the distorted specimens 



Fig. 24. 



Figure of Ray, after Aldrovandus, 



of every ichthyological cabinet. AVe could fill many pages with this kind of illus- 

 tration, but will content ourselves with referring to one of the most curious of them. 

 Leibnitz, who was gifted with a marvelous intellect in which it has been said, 

 " mathematics and moral philosophy, history and philology for the first time found a 

 common seat," was so far led astray as to describe the bones of a rhinoceros as those 

 of a unicorn, and to attempt to restore them in normal position (Fig. 25). The 

 tusk in this figure evidently did not belong to the rest of the skeleton. " This skele- 

 ton of the unicorn was found," says he, " with the hind part of the body reclining as 

 is usual with animals, but the head elevated, bearing on the front a long extended 

 horn of nearly five cubits, of the thickness of the leg of a man."t That a fossil 

 unicorn had existed in past times, Avhen, in common Avith all cotemporaries, the 

 author believed that a unicorn was to be found in Abyssinia, was after- all a natural 



* Aldrovandus, Pisces, 310. 



t Pliysicam Generalem, f'liyniiam. l^Iedicaui, Rotan, llislor. Natur. etc., 1778. 



