still common in warfare, and in other forms of organized
activity. When one reflects that the tenents of the besti-
arists were not only communicated from man to man over
a period of more than a thousand years, but also trans-
lated from language to language and scrambled with the
traditions of hunters, travellers, mythologists, priests,
artists and linguists, it is astonishing that the telegram
should have altered so little: that the purely fabulous cen-
taurs and mermaids should not have appeared among
them, in our copy, as serious animals: and that the modern
reader is yet in a position to construct some reasonable
theory of his own, even about the identity of the Manti-
core and the Griffin.


THE ELIZABETHANS

  It was in the Renaissance, and not in the Dark Ages,
that the mind of mali began seriously to sport with the
fabulous.  It was the Elizabethans, the Euphuists, the
metaphorsicians, the poeticals, who elaborated the Gor-
gons, Harpies, Lamias, Tritons and Nereids.  A visual
comparison between the Doric simplicity of the Manti-
core (page 51) and Yale (page 55), as drawn by the
bestiarist, and the Corinthian detail of their counterparts
in Topsell (pages 247, 265) will showhowthe subject had
proliferated by the time it reached the poets.
  The later influence of the bestiaries, such as it was, is
shown in the diagram on page 263, which may also serve
to elucidate some of the references made in the notes.
  Ariosto, publishing between i~i6 and 1532, and Du
Bartas, who published in I 578, were deeply influenced
by the climate of Gesner. To Gesner, the Swiss naturalist
who was beginning, however uncertainly, to collect
                        261