Natural History in Shakespeare's Time: being Extracts illustrative of the Subject as he knew it

Abstract

WHETHER, as a student, absorbed in the dry details of systematic work, or whether, as a spectator, interested in the marvellous displays of our museums, we of the present day are too apt to forget that natural history has lost one of the greatest of all charms—the charm of the unknown and the mysterious. To us a new animal merely fills one more gap—it may be large or it may be small—in the chain of nature; its interest, unless it be of striking form and beauty, or have something out of the common in its structure, being generally confined to the specialist. Not so the naturalist (save the mark !) of Shakespeare's day. To him the voyager, on his return to his native land, brought some new legend of the cockatrice, the mermaid, the phœnix, or the unicorn, or told of creatures the like of which had never before been heard of in heaven or earth. It mattered not that spolia opima, in the shape of talons, skins, eggs, or feathers, were not to the fore to confirm the story; there the story was, and that sufficed.

Natural History in Shakespeare's Time: being Extracts illustrative of the Subject as he knew it.

By H. W. Seager. 8vo, pp. viii + 358. Illustrated. (London: Elliot Stock, 1896.)