with their solitary leg is not stated.  Sir John
the Traveller says: "In that contree ben
folk, that han but a foot; and thei gon so
fast, that it is marvaylle; and the foot is so
large, that it shadoweth all the body agen
the sonne whanne thei woll lye and reste
hem."

As surprising, in their way, as the
Sciapodes, were the Acephali, or headless men
(there are a good many of them in office at
the present time), dwellers on the Brixontes,
a tributary of the Nile, whose additional
peculiarity was that of having their eye or
eyes (usually it was but one) in the shoulder,
breast, or stomach.  Conrad Wolffahrt, a
learned Alsatian philologist, who Hellenised
his name into Lycosthenis, published a
volume of Prodigiorum (Basel, 1557), in
which are depicted the portraits of all the
monsters which ever did exist or could be
supposed to have existed.  The headless,
double-headed, one-eyed, many-eyed, four-
legged, no-legged, double-bodied, horse-faced,
pig-faced, bird-faced—every variety of
monstrosity, in short, which it is possible to
imagine—find a place in this recondite work.
I will describe a few from the engravings,
taken at random.  At page six hundred and
sixty-eight, is a kind of centaur, the upper
part of whose body is that of a man, the
lower that of a horse, but without a tail; he
has two pairs of arms, the superior pair
terminating in webbed claws, the lower in
human fingers; he has a moustache and
biforked beard, the ears of a horse, a good
crop of well-dressed hair, and his countenance
has a mild and rather agreeable expression,
which bears out the statement in the text
that he is friendly to man (amici sunt
hominum et mulierum).  At page six
hundred and sixty-seven is a Tartarian monster,
who for the convenience of wearing the neck
and head of a dragon, has placed his own
human face in the very middle of his body,
and to assist his motion, has added a pair of
wings, which grow out of his hips; in all
other respects this Tartar (who is not often
caught) resembles a naked man.  He is said
to be most ferocious and inimical to the
human race (animalia sunt ferocissima, et
hominibus inimicissima), and he looks it.  At
page six hundred and sixty-five is a naked
gentleman with a cat's head, said to have
been born at Basle; at page six hundred and
fifty-six, another with the legs and curly tail
of a Newfoundland dog, a native of Cleisdorff,
in Germany.  At page six hundred and forty-
two is a monster whose two hind-legs are
equine, with solid hoofs; his near foreleg is
only a stump, which he brandishes in the air
as if he had just escaped from a trap, and his
off foreleg is the foot of a human being; his
tail is very like the Prince of Wales's
feathers; his mane is plaited, his ears droop,
his eye is perfectly round, and his lips are
hippopotamian.  Job Fincel, who stands god-
father to the greater part of these wonderful
creatures, assigns a town in Pomerania as
the locality of this individual.  At page six
hundred and forty, the author represents a
domestic cat of his own, two of whose legs
curl round and round like tails, while the
tail itself is convoluted like an ingenious
piece of fireworks.  Caspar Peucerus is the
authority, at page six hundred and thirty-
three, for an animal of a monstrous and
horrible form (aspectu tetro et horrido) whose
right-arm stands out stiff from the place
where its right ear ought to be, while the left
arm grows from the hip; the feet terminate
in scaly claws.  At page six hundred, is a
very unfortunate-looking monster with only
one leg and no arms at all; it somehow
contrives to stand upright, and there it remains
fixed, like a milestone.  At page five hundred
and ninety-six, sits an elderly-looking
personage, whose intellectual forehead is twice as high
as the rest of his face, and whose legs, reversing
the usual order, are twisted upwards, so that
his feet rise above his shoulders, one of them
tucked under his arm, the other sustained
in front.  The bowel department of this
gentleman is fully developed like the
mechanism of an open clock, but he appears
tolerably comfortable notwithstanding.  Not
to cumber these columns with too many
monstrosities, I shall only describe one more.
This is a web-footed and web-handed
character of noble parentage (natus est ex
honestis et nobilibus parentibus) out of the
corners of whose eyes flames seem to dart,
and whose nose takes the shape of a long,
curved horn; a forked tail is amongst its
appendages, but the most remarkable parts of
its conformation are six dogs' heads, which
severally ornament the knees, the bend of the
arms, and the armpits.  An extra pair of
eyes is set in the middle of the stomach.

For the rest, there are animals which have
two bodies and only one head between them;
others that indulge in a multiplicity of arms
and legs; parties with horns growing in
impossible places, and tails that issue from
their eyes, ears, and elbows; some of them
very fierce-looking, some exceedingly gentle,
and all of them excessively ridiculous.  One
thing is observable in the collection; each
engraving does duty a dozen times over,—
whether the original flourished in the time
of the Roman Maxentius or the German
Maximilian.

That there were once black monsters
not less than two-and-twenty feet high
("duodeviginti pedes altitudinis capiunt,"
says the Rosanbonian manuscript), the very
delectable romance of the noble and valiant
King, Alexander the Great, informs us in the
following words: "Alexander entering the
country towards the east, found there people
of horrible aspect—full of all manner of evil
ways—who ate all kinds of meat and flesh of
man when they could get it.  The king having
considered their bad customs, and thinking
that if they multiplied through the world,