Unheard-of Monsters.

The marvellous creatures which are described by Pliny, and by our own old English writers, Sir John Mandeville and Geoffrey of Monmouth, are common-place in comparison with some of those mentioned in the Talmud.  Even the monstrous roc of the Arabian Nights must have been a mere tom-tit compared with the bird which Rabbi bar Chama says he once saw.  It was so tall that its head reached the sky, while its feet rested on the bottom of the ocean; and he affords us some slight notion of the depth of the sea by informing us that a carpenter’s axe, which had accidentally fallen in, had not reached the bottom in seven years.  The same Rabbi saw “a frog as large as a village containing sixty houses.”  Huge as this frog was, the snake that swallowed it must have been the very identical serpent of Scandinavian mythology, which encircled the earth; yet a crow gobbled up this serpent, and then flew to the top of a cedar, which was as broad as sixteen waggons placed side by side.—­Sailors’ “yarns,” as they are spun to marvel-loving old ladies in our jest-books, are as nothing to the rabbinical accounts of “strange fish,” some with eyes like the moon, others horned, and 300 miles in length.  Not less wonderful are some four-footed creatures.  The effigy of the unicorn, familiar to every schoolboy, on the royal arms of Great Britain, affords no adequate idea of the actual dimensions of that remarkable animal.  Since a unicorn one day old is as large as Mount Tabor, it may readily be supposed that Noah could not possibly have got a full-grown one into the ark; he therefore secured it by its horn to the side, and thus the creature was saved alive. (The Talmudist had forgot that the animals saved from the Flood were in pairs.)[80] The celebrated Og, king of Bashan, it seems, was one of the antediluvians, and was saved by riding on the back of the unicorn.  The dwellers in Brobdignag were pigmies compared with the renowned King Og, since his footsteps were forty miles apart, and Abraham’s ivory bed was made of one of his teeth.  Moses, the Rabbis tell us, was ten cubits high[81] and his walking-stick ten cubits more, with the top of which, after jumping ten cubits from the ground, he contrived to touch the heel of King Og; from which it has been concluded that that monarch was from two to three thousand cubits in height.  But (remarks an English writer) a certain Jewish traveller has shown the fallacy of this mensuration, by meeting with the end of one of the leg-bones of the said King Og, and travelling four hours before he came to the other end.  Supposing this Rabbi to have been a fair walker, the bone was sixteen miles long!

   [80] Is it possible that this “story” of the unicorn was
        borrowed and garbled from the ancient Hindu legend of
        the Deluge?  “When the flood rose Manu embarked in the
        ship, and the fish swam towards him, and he fastened the
        ship’s cable to its horn.”  But in the Hindu legend the
        fish (that is, Brahma in the form of a great fish) tows
        the vessel, while in the Talmudic legend the ark of Noah
        takes the unicorn in tow.