On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (22 page)

News of Linnaeus’s discovery spread quickly, and the price of the burgomaster’s trophy plummeted. Reading the writing on the wall, Linnaeus left town, lest he himself become a taxidermied trophy.

The story of Linnaeus debunking the apocalyptic monster is characteristic of the new scientific era. Science was on the rise, and monsters
were being exposed as hoaxes or were being cleaned up and fit into the new system of uniform natural laws. Linnaeus himself became the great classifier of animal and plant species, genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla. A conceptual grid of hierarchic categories had been laid over the teeming chaos of nature, and a calm order had been imposed on the seemingly infinite diversity of God’s creation. But monsters, from Aristotle’s time to the present, always disrupt the neat categories of taxonomy and pose irritating anomalies for science. Hybrids and border-crossing beings are fanciful (like the griffin or centaur) but also real (like the platypus and the slime mold), and the scientific demystification happens only slowly and laboriously. The knowledge that unicorns do not belong in legitimate natural history came arduously, by degrees, whereas the platypus, sent to Europe as a stuffed specimen, was long considered a fake because scientists found the weird creature impossible to believe.
²

A dragon from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s sixteenth-century
Natural History of Snakes and Dragons
. From
Dover Pictorial Archive Series, ijoo Real and Fanciful Animals, from Seventeenth-century Engravings by Matthaus Merian the Younger
(Dover Publications, 1998).

Eventually creatures that seemed to exist between taxonomic categories, together with other data sources, led to serious questions about the ontology of species. But all of that came later. In this section I want to discuss the earlier forms of skepticism, the forms that naturalized the animal kingdom by removing it from the moral sphere of medieval spiritualism. Monstrous species, as the extreme fringes of the animal kingdom, were slowly reconsidered under the conceptual lenses of the new life sciences. But human attraction to and repulsion from the grotesque could not be expunged entirely, even with the new rigorous natural history. Fresh marvels, both hoaxes and realities, continued to excite the more sober endeavors of life science.

Woodcut of a sea monster in Konrad Gesner’s credulous sixteenth-century natural history. From
Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts: A Selection of 190 Sixteenth-century Woodcuts from Gesner’s and Topsell’s Natural History
(Dover Publications, 1971).

The medieval
Liber Monstrorum
(discovered with the
Beowulf
text) is a forerunner of later scientific monster skepticism and a taste of prescientific incredulity.
³
The doubt was strangely selective and seemed aimed more at pagan poets and philosophers, but nonetheless it expressed a nagging question that continued to grow until reaching a crescendo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Which exotic creatures are real and which are fake?
⁴

It did not help matters that in the prescientific era most zoology was explicitly religious and moral. One of the most influential works of allegorical zoology from the early Middle Ages through the early modern era was the encyclopedia of animals known as the
Physiologus
. Of unknown authorship, the originally Greek
Physiologus
dates back to second-century Alexandria but became highly influential several centuries later, when it resurfaced in Latin translation. Together with St. Isidore’s later
Etymologiae
, the
Physiologus
inspired a whole tradition of medieval animal allegories, usually illustrated, called “bestiaries.” This allegorical tradition often repeated and embellished the same list of creatures; early versions contained animals and legends from the Mediterranean and North Africa, and later versions incorporated the fauna and fables of northern Europe. It bears mentioning that monsters often had their origin in the specific animal threats of a geographic region. In the imaginative construction of a frightening beast, a folk culture will frequently embellish the local predators rather than compose a completely novel monster. The medieval monster folklore of northern Europe, for example, drew heavily on the devouring wolf as an archetype of monstrosity.
⁵

Very slowly the allegorical tradition gave way to more objective zoology. In the early seventeenth century the gradual turn from magical thinking to science had major implications for monsters. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who said, “We must make a collection or particular natural history of all the monsters and prodigious products of nature,”
⁶
argued that systematic knowledge would surface only after we amassed collections and specimens in warehouses of study, called “Solomon’s houses.” In his highly influential book
The New Atlantis
(1626), Bacon imagined scientific societies where researchers would work together sharing information and conducting experiments. “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
⁷

To this end, real scientific societies began to form in the century that followed Bacon’s call for Solomon’s houses, including England’s Royal Society, France’s Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. These groups embraced the new empirical epistemology: that knowledge derives from experimental observation rather than scripture and classical tradition. Skepticism had graduated from suspicion of other cultures (e.g., the
Liber Monstrorum
’s distrust of pagan sources) to suspicion of
all
folk superstition. The savants of this era believed that a universal rationality operated below the surface of idiosyncratic cultural bias and could be accessed through careful empirical analysis and mathematics. Bacon argued that science should build itself from the bottom up using inductive reasoning; particular observations come first, then axioms or hypotheses, and, once corroborated, laws of nature could then be stated. But concerning monsters and natural history, the work was always fraught with obdurate gullibility.

When we collect monstrous specimens, Bacon argued, we must be careful of men who practice “natural magic or alchemy” and also those who are “suitors and lovers of fables.” Gullibility seems to be the norm when cataloguing nature, so he argued that whatever we admit into our new scientific system must be “drawn from serious and credible history and trustworthy reports.”

In the tradition of Bacon’s skepticism, Thomas Browne (1605–1682) published a compendium of “vulgar errors” called
Pseudodoxia epidemica
(1646) in which he rolled his eyes, so to speak, at the legends of griffins and other monsters.
⁸
He argued that when the Bible and other revered texts refer to the griffin, they are only referring to a large bird, and that the idea of a hybrid monster has come down to us through hyperbolic
embellishment of the original meaning. Furthermore, he suggested that any direct references to the griffin’s hybrid status can be shown to be directly or indirectly derivative of the old Aristeas legend of the Arimaspean war with the Griffin, a legend that has no outside corroboration.
⁹

Sketch of a sea-devil in Ambroise Paré’s sixteenth-century book
On Monsters
. From Ernst Lehner,
Symbols, Signs and Signets
(Dover Publications, 1969).

The generations of naturalists that followed Bacon and Browne began to emphasize taxonomy, the rational naming and grouping of species. This method began to produce new compendia that, unlike the pell-mell bestiaries that listed animals alphabetically, had some logical organization, grouping animals according to common environment, common morphology, common physiological function, or other criteria. It wasn’t enough anymore to pile together a bunch of mundane and fantastical creatures, only to point out their Christ-like symbolism. Naturalists such as Linnaeus, Buffon, Lamarck, Geoffroy, and Cuvier were discovering the inner logic of nature, referring nature to
itself
rather than the deity.

In addition to developing a common language, Linnaeus’s Latin binomial nomenclature, naturalists also began to use the pictorial tradition (e.g., woodcuts, etchings, illuminations, pencil illustrations) to sift through the credible and incredible history of animals. If multiple drawings done by different sources of an exotic creature all conveyed a similar shape and comportment, one could feel more confident about those data. If, however, an image only reproduced earlier images (as the bestiaries did) without actual firsthand observation, then those data fell into a dubious category. The gaps in the fence of acceptable knowledge
were closing and leaving monsters and fantastical creatures outside in a kind of limbo.

Ambroise Paré’s “very monstrous animal that is born in Africa,” in his book
On Monsters
. From Ernst Lehner,
Symbols, Signs and Signets
(Dover Publications, 1969).

The unicorn, for example, was a fantastic creature whose pedigree went back to Ctesias and Pliny; it appeared in the Bible (the King James translation), and it regularly appeared as an incarnation symbol in the bestiaries. But Harriet Ritvo points out that as scientific collecting and classifying progressed, the unicorn seemed more and more unlikely. The only physical evidence of such a creature was the horn that populated many early European curiosity cabinets. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, these long straight horns were successfully identified as the tusks of the arctic narwhale (
Monodon monoceros
). “By the end of the Victorian period ‘unicorn’s horns’ had come, in the eyes of progressive modern curators, to symbolize the dark ages of museology.”
¹⁰

As Linnaeus and other sober-minded naturalists deflated taxidermied hoaxes, and other bones and evidence were reduced to more mundane phenomena, the old favorites began to die out. Talk of Cynocephali, Blemmyae, Sciopodes, and Cyclopes faded away. All this science, with its orderly systematizing, certainly managed to expose some monster superstitions, myths, and frauds. But immediately on the heels of the Enlightenment
one finds a new and more extreme taste for the fantastical in the form of the disorderly, the exotic, the freakish, the monstrous. In the Victorian era a taste for the abnormal, usually still disguised as “science,” burst forth, gorging on all manner of freak show and bizarre spectacle.