When you consider the world’s actual biodiversity, our fantasy menageries start to seem sparse. Sure, dragons, mermaids, and cyclops are cool enough—but why settle? What about all the horrific non-creatures that have vanished from the collective imagination, never to be feared again? Who remembers them?
Thank goodness for John Ashton. Born in 1834, Ashton was too late to map the globe, but too early to shoot for outer space or the deep oceans (or to work for Atlas Obscura). A contemporaneous review of his work describes him as, instead, an explorer of libraries—“he brings within the ken of the public the information and illustrations for which the explorer or the scholar has had to hunt for in out-of-the-way and half-forgotten volumes.” His books deal with narrow but gripping subjects: street ballads, the history of bread, and eighteenth century waifs, to name a few. But his greatest contribution to the field was doubtlessly Curious Creatures in Zoology, his 1890 attempt to preserve the concoctions, hallucinations, and other hopeful, fearful missteps ginned up by early naturalists.
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