THE SPHINX OR SPHINGA.
"The Sphinx or Sphinga is of the kinde of Apes, having his body rough like Apes, having the upper part like a woman and their visage much like them. The voice very like a man's, but not articular, sounding as if one did speak hastily or with sorrow. Their haire browne or swarthy colour. They are bred in India and Ethyopia. The true Sphinx is of a fierce though a tameable nature and if a man do first of all perceive or discerne of these natural Sphinges, before the beast discerne or perceive the man, he shall be safe; but if the beast first descrie the man, then is it mortal to the man.
THE MANTICHORA.
"The Mantichora is bred among the Indians, having a treble row of teeth beneathe and above, whose greatnesse, roughnesse and feete are like a Lyons, his face and ears like unto a mans, his eyes grey and collour red, his taile like the taile of a scorpion of the earth, armed with a sting, casting forth sharp pointed quills, his voice like the voice of a small trumpet or pipe, being in course as swift as a Hart."
Then follows further description of the Mantichora. This singular combination of lion, man, scorpion, and porcupine was implicitly believed in by all the natural history writers up to Goldsmith's day, and we are not sure that that pleasing but gullible scribe did not, privately at least, accord its existence full credence.
Leigh Hunt, in his Autobiography, describes the extraordinary effect which a sight of this beast had upon him when he encountered it in an old folio during his childhood. The Mantichora, he says, "unspeakably shocked me. It had the head of a man, grinning with rows of teeth, and the body of a wild beast, brandishing a tail armed with stings. It was sometimes called by the ancients Martichora. But I did not know that. I took the word to be a horrible compound of man and tiger. The beast figures in Pliny and the old travellers. Appolonius takes a fearful joy in describing him. 'Mantichora,' says old Morell—'bestia horrenda'—'a brute fit to give one the horrors.' The possibility of such creatures being pursued never occurred to me. Alexander, I thought, might have been encountered while crossing the Granicus, and elephants might be driven into the sea, but how could anyone face a beast with a man's head?" Leigh Hunt goes on to describe how the Mantichora impressed his whole childhood. Doubtless the sensations of the eighteenth-century child were the same felt by the early seventeenth century Prince Henry. The Mantichora was the bête noire of the Royal nursery, we may depend upon it.
Scarcely less dreadful was the Collogruis, whose picture is given on the next page.
How many of us have heard of the Colus?
"There is," we read, "among the Scithians and Sarmatians a foure-footed wild beast called Colus, being in quantitie and stature betwixt a Ramnie and a Hart and dusky white coloured, but the young ones yellow." The real peculiarity of the Colus, which makes every true lover of quadrupeds regret its extinction, is described as follows: "Her manner is to drinke by the holes in her nostrils, whereby she snuffeth up aboundance of water and carrieth it in her head, so that she will live in dry pastures remote from all moisture and great season, quenching her thirst by that cisterne in her head." Imagination conjures up a huge drove of Colii, blissfully encamped in the midst of the Sahara, astonishing the passing Bedouins by their sagacity and the amazing cisterns in their craniums. There was no use trying to capture them, so fleet and nimble were they, unless, indeed, the hunter had taken the precaution to arm himself with a flute or a timbrel. In that case he had only to strike up a few airs and it was all up with the poor Colus. He would fall down with weakness, and a simple blow with a staff sufficed to dispatch him. He made excellent eating; flavoured, we suppose, by the contents of the cranial cistern afore described.