With “veracious” histories of this description, is it to be wondered at that such beings as these referred to were made use of in heraldry and accepted as varieties or emblems of some particular quality in man? The fictitious beings used as symbols in heraldry may be divided into two courses: (1) Celestial beings mentioned in Holy Writ, and those creatures of the imagination which, from the earliest ages, have held possession of men’s minds, profound symbols unlike anything within the heavens or in the earth beneath or in the waters below the earth. As an occasion of how an error within the form of an animal could also be perpetuated unperceived, it may be talked about that even in one of the best books on heraldry, natural history, and in different illustrated publications, the elephant isn’t to be seen appropriately delineated. Under this idea the noble type of the lion might have been distorted to resemble the wild cat in the fury of its contortions. Pliny and lots of the writers of his day describe sure animals in a manner that seems the absurdest fable; even the lion described by him is in some factors most unnatural.
These animals had been resembling they may have little probability of seeing, and so they probably accepted their descriptions from “travellers’ tales,” always filled with the marvellous-and the misleading histories of still earlier writers. Bossewell, an heraldic author of the sixteenth century, after the model of his forerunner, Gerard Leigh, edified his readers with comments on natural history in such a delightful method (in response to his friend Roscarrocke) as to provoke the envy of Pliny in Elysium, although now these descriptions in many situations solely serve to call up a smile from their very absurdity. It is a pure and possible mode of accounting for its unnatural look. “The multitude of dragons, various as they are, reflecting the fears and fancies of the most completely different races, it is greater than possible is a relic of the early serpent-worship which, based on Mr. Fergusson, is of such distant antiquity that the religion of the Jews was trendy compared, the curse laid on the serpent being, in truth, levelled on the ancient superstition which it was supposed to supersede. They might have little alternative of buying a appropriate information of the rarer kinds of animals; that they had not the advantage of seeing menageries of wild beasts, or of consulting books on natural historical past with glorious illustrations, as the modern herald could do.
2) Animals purely heraldic, such as the heraldic tiger, panther incensed, heraldic antelope, &c., owe their origin and significance to different ideas, and have to be accounted for on different grounds, specifically, the mistaken ideas ensuing from imperfect knowledge of these objects in natural history by early writers and herald painters, to whom they were no doubt actual animals with natural qualities, and, as such, in line with their knowledge, they depicted them; and although extra gentle has been thrown upon the study of pure history since their time, and a lot of their conceptions have been proved to be erroneous, the effectively-recognized heraldic shapes of many of those lusus naturæ are still retained in modern armory. The Heraldic Pelican, again, is evidently a mistake of the early artists, much like the heraldic tiger, heraldic antelope, &c., and the persistent following of the standard “pattern” by the heralds when as soon as established. Some symbols, once more, are neither real nor do they pretend to be fabulous, equivalent to the two-headed eagle, but are pure heraldic innovations that have each their particular signification. They may be abstract concepts embodied in tangible shape, such as the terrible creature, the kind of some divine high quality, that stands calm, immovable, and imperishable throughout the partitions of our National Museum; such varieties because the dragon, of the purely imaginative class, and people creatures compounded of parts of different actual animals, but unlike any one in every of them, every possessing special symbolic attributes, in response to the standard ideas held regarding them.
Some writers, nonetheless, maintain that these monstrosities aren’t a lot the result of ignorance of the true forms of the beasts as that they have been intended to typify certain extraordinary qualities, and due to this fact exaggeration of the pure shapes and functions was needful to precise such qualities. It was accredited with wondrous qualities, and the very sight of it “abominable and fearful to behold.” Elian, Nicander, Dioscorides and Pliny all agree in that it possessed the facility of immediately extinguishing any hearth into which it was put, and that it might even rush at or charge the flame, which it effectively knew find out how to extinguish. Quoth he: “The salamander liveth in the hearth and hath the power to extinguish it.” There may be, too, a lingering fashionable belief that if a hearth has been burning for seven years there can be a salamander produced from it. The Panther incensed, breathing hearth and smoke out of its mouth, nostril and ears, appears as if taken from some misleading historical past-like that of the boar, by Xenophon, already referred to-or the result of the erroneous description of some terrified traveller. Xenophon, for instance, describing a boar hunt, gravely tells us: “So sizzling are the boar’s tusks when he is simply useless that if an individual lays hairs upon them the hairs will shrivel up; and when the boar is alive they-that is, the tusks-are actually purple sizzling when he is irritated, for in any other case he would not singe the guidelines of the dogs’ hair when he misses a blow at their our bodies.” The salamander in flames, of frequent prevalence in heraldry, is of this class.