Animals: Jenny Hanivers

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Natural histories of the 16th Century broke into a rash of stories about marvelous fish shaped like men. Pierre Belon, author of the world's first treatise on fish (De Aquatilibus; 1553), furnished a drawing of a "monkfish" captured in Norway, a creature in scaly but clerical garb with a human face, a monk's shaven crown, vague appendages for arms and a fish's tail. It lived three days, the author averred, uttering lamentations. A contemporary ichthyologist named Guillaume Rondelet reproduced a drawing which he claimed had been sent him by Marguerite d'Anglouleme, Queen of Navarre (The Heptameron). It represented a "bishop-fish" which, though scaly, had distinct arms and legs, a pointed head and a sly look. When shown to the King of Poland the bishopfish made "vehement signs" indicating a desire to return to the water, and it was put back in the sea. At about the same time an alert Swiss naturalist named Conrad Gesner published the first unmistakable illustration of a Jenny Hani-ver—a flying dragon—and reported that vendors of quack medicines used such things to impress their customers. In succeeding centuries Italian and French scientists furnished depictions of other specimens, some very elaborate, and museums began to acquire them. Dr. Gudger unearthed two very recent cases of Jenny Haniver fabrication. Five years ago an Allentown, Pa. cobbler-fisher-man announced he had caught a fish with a human face, got his story in the newspapers and interested Muhlenberg College scientists. Last year a Bronx man went to Dr. Gudger with an 18-inch Jenny bought from a Swedish fisherman in Florida and made from a guitarfish. Dr. Gudger holds it impossible that these two illiterate fabricators had ever heard of Jenny Hanivers, believes that, like the early makers, they discovered a faint human resemblance in the fish and experienced an obscure impulse to accentuate it.

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