Natural history in Shakespeare's time : being extracts illustrative of the subject as he knew it / Made by H. W. Seager, M. B., &c. Also pictures thereunto belonging.

Seager, H. W. (Herbert West), 1848-

Date:: 1896

Credit: Natural history in Shakespeare's time : being extracts illustrative of the subject as he knew it / Made by H. W. Seager, M. B., &c. Also pictures thereunto belonging. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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$and upon silk the aforesaid horn, and if so be that it be true the silk will not be a whit consumed. Topsell, Four-footed Beasts, pp. 551-9. We are so far from denying that there is any Unicorn at all, that we will affirm there are many kinds thereof In the number of quadrupeds, we will concede no less than five ; that is, the Indian ox, the Indian ass, the rhinoceros, the oryx, and that which is more eminently termed Monoceros or Unicornis. Some in the list of fishes; and some Unicorns we will allow even among insects [here follow two folio pages of argument about the origin and genuine- ness of the horns]. Si?- Tkos. Brozvne, Vulgar Errors, bk. iii. ch. xxiii. \Fy)ies Moryson, in his Itinerary, describes two whole Unicorns' horns, each more than four foot long, and a third, shorter, which were in the Treasury of St Mark at Venice (part i. bk. ii. ch. i.), and great Unicorns' horns, and the chief kinds of precious stones in Naples {ibid., ch. ii.).] The Unicorn is hunted for his horn. The rest is left for carrion. Middleto?! and Rowky, A Fair Ouarrel, iii. 2. Of the Unicorn none hath been seen these hundred years last past. Purchai Pilgrims, p. 502 (ed. 1616). [But the ingenious gentlemen who edited the British Apollo would not go so far as to deny (in 1710) the exist- ence of the Unicorn.] Urchin. Tempest, i. 2, 326. V. Hedgehog. Venom. Some [beasts] have slaying tongues and venomous, through malice and wodeness of the humour that hath mastery there- in ; as the tongues of serpents, adders, dragons, and of a wode hound, whose biting is most venomous, his tongue$