The reader will, we apprehend, by this time have had enough of absurdities, but still we can imagine his anxiety to know what a cockatrice was like.  The following is from Aldrovandus, a celebrated naturalist of the sixteenth century, whose work on natural history, in thirteen folio volumes, contains with much that is valuable a large proportion of fables and inutilities.  In particular he is so ample on the subject of the cock and the bull that from his practice, all rambling, gossiping tales of doubtful credibility are called cock and bull stories.  Aldrovandus, however, deserves our respect and esteem as the founder of a botanic garden, and as a pioneer in the now prevalent custom of making scientific collections for purposes of investigation and research.

Shelley, in his “Ode to Naples,” full of the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples, in 1820, thus uses an allusion to the basilisk: 

   “What though Cimmerian anarchs dare blaspheme
    Freedom and thee? a new Actaeon’s error
    Shall theirs have been,—­devoured by their own hounds! 
      Be thou like the imperial basilisk,
    Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds! 
      Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk,
      Aghast she pass from the earth’s disk. 
    Fear not, but gaze,—­for freemen mightier grow,
    And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe.”

THE UNICORN

Pliny, the Roman naturalist, out of whose account of the unicorn most of the modern unicorns have been described and figured, records it as “a very ferocious beast, similar in the rest of its body to a horse, with the head of a deer, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, a deep, bellowing voice, and a single black horn, two cubits in length, standing out in the middle of its forehead.”  He adds that “it cannot be taken alive;” and some such excuse may have been necessary in those days for not producing the living animal upon the arena of the amphitheatre.

The unicorn seems to have been a sad puzzle to the hunters, who hardly knew how to come at so valuable a piece of game.  Some described the horn as movable at the will of the animal, a kind of small sword, in short, with which no hunter who was not exceedingly cunning in fence could have a chance.  Others maintained that all the animal’s strength lay in its horn, and that when hard pressed in pursuit, it would throw itself from the pinnacle of the highest rocks horn foremost, so as to pitch upon it, and then quietly march off not a whit the worse for its fall.

But it seems they found out how to circumvent the poor unicorn at last.  They discovered that it was a great lover of purity and innocence, so they took the field with a young virgin, who was placed in the unsuspecting admirer’s way.  When the unicorn spied her, he approached with all reverence, couched beside her, and laying his head in her lap, fell asleep.  The treacherous virgin then gave a signal, and the hunters made in and captured the simple beast.