rst catalogue, compiled by Dr. Green, contains the
following, among many other marvellous notices:--

"The quills of a porcupine, which on certain occasions the creature can
shoot at the pursuing enemy and erect at pleasure.

"The flying squirrel, which for a good nut-tree will pass a river on the
bark of a tree, erecting his tail for a sail.

"The leg-bone of an elephant, brought out of Syria for the thigh-bone of
a giant. In winter, when it begins to rain, elephants are mad, and so
continue from April to September, chained to some tree, and then become
tame again.

"Tortoises, when turned on their backs, will sometimes fetch deep sighs
and shed abundance of tears.

"A humming-bird and nest, said to weigh but twelve grains; his feathers
are set in gold, and sell at a great rate.

"A bone, said to be taken out of a mermaid's head.

"The largest whale--liker an island than an animal.

"The white shark, which sometimes swallows men whole.

"A siphalter, said with its sucker to fasten on a ship and stop it under
sail.

"A stag-beetle, whose horns, worn in a ring, are good against the cramp.

"A mountain cabbage--one reported 300 feet high."

The author of "Hudibras," who died in 1680, attacked the Royal Society
for experiments that seemed to him futile and frivolous, in a severe and
bitter poem, entitled, "The Elephant in the Moon," the elephant proving
to be a mouse inside a philosopher's telescope. The poem expresses the
current opinion of the society, on which King Charles II. is once said
to have played a joke.

In 1726-27 Swift, too, had his bitter jeer at the society. In Laputa, he
thus describes the experimental philosophers:--

"The first man I saw," he says, "was of a meagre aspect, with sooty
hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several
places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He
had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of
cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let
out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. He told me he did not
doubt that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the
governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained
that his stock was low, and entreated me 'to give him something as an
encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear
season for cucumbers.' I made him a small present, for my lord had
furnished me with money