with the ludicrous. He had no bones at all
in his body, except in his skull, and at the
ends of his fingers. He could neither stand
nor sit upright, unless when swollen with
anger; and his body was so pliant that, if it
was desired to move him from one place to
another, he was folded up like a garment;
after which, before he could be consulted, it
was necessary to roll him backward and
forward on the floor.*
* See Price's Essay towards the History of Arabia.

Pomponius Mela mentions another race of
African prodigies called Ægypani, who were
human above the waist and goatish below it,
—a kind of satyrs. Well might the poet
talk of,

All monsters which hot Africke forth doth send
'Twixt Nilus, Atlas, aud the southern cape.
FAIRFAX'S Tasso.

But modern speculation has been here, as
everywhere else, disenchanting our magic
regions, and showing all their wonders to be
literal facts exaggerated. Satyrs were
baboons or apes: and the gentlemen with their
eyes and mouths in their breasts, were simply
a race of high-shouldered, short-necked
individuals, with heads proportionably depressed,
and partly concealed by their shoulders and
their long thick hair. Readers of the Tempest,
however, will not suffer so matter-of-fact
an explanation to enter those far-off
marvellous islands, where the very earth is startled
into strange life by the ceaseless thunders
that surge over it.

Ethiopia, according to Pliny, not only
produced pigmies, but also a race of people
without any noses — having perfectly plain and
flat visages; another without lips; and a
third tongueless. Those who were minus the
nasal organ were probably negroes, in whom
that feature is never prominent. Bion testifies
to the existence of a nation called Nigræ,
whose king had but one eye to bless himself
with; which may have been intended as a
covert satire upon the semi-blindness
frequently attributed, by the unbelieving, to
the kingly office. It does not appear that
the subjects of his Polyphemic majesty were
at all deficient in their visual powers; but a
moiety of what they possessed in full seems
to have been the chief prerogative of the head
of their army, law, and church, and probably
one of the evidences of his divine right.
Ethiopia also produces the Troglodytes, or
cave-dwellers, who are the swiftest-footed of
all men, and who feed upon serpents, lizards,
and other reptiles. They speak a language
like no other, says Herodotus, but screech
like bats.

Great, however, as Africa was in the
production of marvels, it must yield to India.
For many centuries that remote region was
to Europeans a land of enchantment and
dreams. Whatever was most fantastic, most
portentous, most rich and strange, most
gorgeous, or most vision-like, had there its
natural and long-abiding home. The mountains,
rivers, and seas that bound the territory
of the Hindus, were to the western
nations like the talismanic circles of a magician,
holding within themselves all the vastness
of the preternatural world. Apollonius
of Tyana, dissatisfied with any less prodigious
limitation to such a domain of prodigies, has
surrounded India with a zone of intertangled
dragons. But the very facts that had been
ascertained concerning the country, helped to
encourage that overshadowing faith in the
marvellous in which Europeans were disposed
to regard it. The spirit of an awful antiquity
seemed to dwell there like a visible presence.
The people themselves appeared priestlike,
and familiar with mysteries and the remote
origin of things. Little being known of their
daily life, the wildest shapes of the imagination
did not meet with any abrupt contradictions,
which might have made them simply
ludicrous, but seemed to walk within a sphere
of wonder, peculiar to themselves, and
uninvaded by the outer world. For, until
comparatively recent times, this land of marvels
was rarely entered by western visitors ; and
fiction was left to luxuriate undisturbed, in
rich and heavy overgrowth.

Successive generations of travellers and
geographical writers, from Ctesias down to
Sir John Mandeville, have concured in filling
India with bewildering phantasms. This has
been in some measure accounted for by a
recent writer, who remarks that Ctesias
appears to have taken sculptured symbols for
the representation of real existing creatures;
all the anomalies described by him being
still found represented on the walls of the
pagodas or temples, as types of the Hindu
mythology. It would be tedious to mention
all the monstrous shapes that were the
common-places and familiar things of the lands
beyond the Indus; but these are some of the
most remarkable:—Men and women with
dogs' heads, who, says Mandeville, be right
fierce, and talk not as other men, but bark as
dogs; men with only one leg, warranted by
the same authority to be right nimble and
fast to go, by leaping and hopping with the
one leg; others whose ears reached to the
ground;** others with their feet reversed;
pigmies (for these were supposed to exist in
India as well as in Ethiopia); the dreadful
beast mantichora (of whom more presently);
dragons, griffins, and four-footed birds as

** In the fourth, book (canto seven) of the Faery
Queene, we have a wild man of the woods, whose ears
reach down to his waist—
More great than th' eares of elephants by Indus' flood.
It is remarkable that the whole description of this
monster resembles that given of the one-eyed ogre in the
third voyage of Sinbad the Sailor; of whom it is said:
His fore-teeth were very long and sharp, and stood out
of his mouth, which was as deep as that of a horse ; his
upper lip hung down upon his breast; his ears resembled
those of an elephant, and covered his shoulders; and his
nails were as long and crooked as the talons of the
greatest birds.