The basilisk is mentioned by most of the old writers, by Dioscorides, by Galen, Pliny, Solinus, Ælian, Ætius, Avicen, Ardoynus, Grevinus, and many others. Aristotle makes no mention of it. Scaliger gravely describes one that was found in Rome in the days of Leo IV., while Sigonius and others are so far from denying the possibility of such a beast that they have duly set forth various kinds or sub-species. Pliny, for instance, describes a thing he calls the Catoblepas, while Ætius gives details of another called Dryinus, each being only modifications of the basilisk idea. Where, of course, the whole thing was purely a figment of the imagination, the multiplication of species presents no difficulty at all, and it really makes little difference whether all the peculiarities and properties be focussed on one creature, or whether they be divided by a three or a four, and due distribution of them made to a like number of slightly varying monsters. There is no doubt but that if Baron Munchausen had turned his attention to this branch of natural history, we should have had many more species to record, and some of them probably still more wonderful than any at present described. The very indefiniteness of the descriptions gives them an added charm and affords full scope for romancing. Familiarity is undoubtedly likely to lead to contempt, and probably if the Zoological Society of London are ever able to add a basilisk to their fine collection of reptiles it will be a very disappointing feature.
The Phoenix had what we may be allowed to call a literary existence amongst the Greeks and Romans, but scarcely became a visible creation of the artist until the mythic fowl was accepted by the early Christians as a type of the resurrection of the body--an association of ideas that afterwards rendered its use very common, and Tertullian, amongst other early writers, thus refers to its symbolic use. According to a tale narrated to Herodotus on his visit to Heliopolis, the phoenix visited that place once every 500 years, bringing with it the body of its predecessor, and burning it with myrrh in the sanctuary of the Sun-god; but the version on which the Christian moral and application is based is somewhat different. It is founded on the old belief that the phoenix, when it arrived at the age of 1461 years, committed itself to the flames that burst, at the fanning of its wings, from the funeral pyre that it had itself constructed of costly spices, and that from its ashes a new phoenix arose to life. This belief, which appears to us so absurd, was for hundreds of years as accepted a fact as any other point in natural history. The home of the phoenix was said to be at that delightfully vague address, somewhere in Arabia.