A Description of More Than Three Hundred Animals: Interspersed with ...

Lapithæ, a people who vanquished the Centaurs. Their fabulous existence had its origin in that love of the marvellous which is always found to exist in the earlier stages of society, and which induces men to interpret metaphorical descriptions in a literal sense. Hence the natives of Thessaly being distinguished by their skill in horsemanship, at a time when their neighbours were unacquainted with the art of riding, they would be described as combining the powers both of the human and equine race; in like manner as some of the American tribes, when they first beheld the Spaniards mounted on horses, mistook them for a different race of beings from themselves, supposing them to be half men and half quadrupeds. It is by availing itself of such errors, that fiction, whether it employs poetry or painting for its vehicle, creates those fanciful beings and shapes with which it delights to excite curiosity and gratify the imagination.

THE SATYR.

ALTHOUGH the Satyr of the ancient poets can hardly be termed an animal, as the human form predominates, he may be introduced here as our final example of these fabulous creatures. Satyrs and Fauns are represented as men with goats' legs and horns, and were supposed to be the attendants of Bacchus. The idea of such beings was probably derived from some of the larger species of apes. Exaggerated and erroneous reports of these creatures were probably first introduced into Greece by the companions of Bacchus, on his return from his Indian expedition. Hence, in course of time, they came to be considered as his attendants, and were described as inhabiting woods and forests, of which they were regarded as the protecting deities. Probably, too, they were partly per

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A DESCRIPTION OF FABULOUS ANIMALS.

sonifications, intended to express the debasing influence of animal propensities and sensual indulgence; and as nothing tends more than intoxication to reduce man to a level with the brutes, since it deprives reason of all control over the passions, the form of the Satyr may have been ingeniously intended as a visible representation of the degraded state of those who surrender up the noblest prerogative of man. Whether such was really or not the idea of those who first feigned the existence of such creatures, we may very rationally adopt this explanation, and thereby deduce an important moral lesson from what is in itself an extravagant fiction.