The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt Page A

troglodyte on show in London in 1758, but could not be satisfied, for the sake of the child’s modesty.
    He believed also, as did Artedi, in sirens and mermaids, and in the sea-cows, the cattle of the undines—he examined a calf found on the seashore, and concluded that it must have been born prematurely, since it had not developed suitable lungs for underwater breathing. He believed to the end of his life that swallows spent the winter on the bottom of lakes, beneath the ice.
    He also believed in, and indeed, claimed emphatically that he had been attacked by, a pestilential creature called
Furia infernalis
, the Fury from Hell, or “the shot.” The Fury was wingless, and fell from the skies in Lapland, where one had once been observed when it landed in the plate of a vicar. CL, in the days of his fame, offered a gold medal for a preserved Fury, and despatched his students into the Lapp wastes in search of the creature. CL gave each of his students a farmyard beast to shadow, one a cow, one a pig, one a goose, one an ass, requiring each student to count and describe the hundreds of species of plants consumed as they vanished down their familiars’ throats (the students had nicknames derived from “their” beasts, the Oxman, Lord Swine, Rooster, Balaam [from the speaking Ass] and so on). Such ateacher was a true scientist; but the same teacher despatched the same students to hunt the Furies among the Sami witches, or as we would now say, shamans.
    CL was an inhabitant of that borderland between magic and science, religion and philosophy, observation and belief, where most of our fellow men still wander, questing and amazed. It is true that he had his necessary armour of scepticism. The tone of his observations in the court building at Jönköping is robust. He saw there,
    â€œa large collection of witches’ paraphernalia, such as treatises on black magic which we read and found to be full of deceit and vanities, antiquated and false receipts, idolatry, superstitious prayers and invocation of devils … We blew the sacred horn without conjuring up the devil, and milked the milking-sticks without drawing milk. Here were to be seen sorceries, made neither by witches nor by devils but from the triple stomach of a ruminant animal. Here were eagles’ feet with outstretched claws, with which wizards tore the stomachs of those who had colic; I should think that they no more deserved to be burned than do the Chinese who pierce a hole right in the belly … And here also we were able to see the genuine instruments of wizards; knives, hammers, cudgels and iron bullets by the use of which men have been killed by their enemies.”
    But the same man saved his eight-year-old sister, Emerentia, from death by smallpox, by killing and flaying a sheep, and laying the child in the skin, to “draw her from death.” The inspiration, he claimed, was biblical, drawn from King David, who “when old took two young girls into his bed so that by their healthy transpiration they might revive him.”Later, in his medical notes,
Lachesis Naturalis
, CL endorsed David’s advice, prescribing a bed-rest between two young people as a quick cure for a cold.
    I N 1935, workmen repairing the house in the Botanic Garden at Uppsala found under the floorboards, buried in a pile of rubbish, a little notebook which proved to be the notebook he had carried on that memorable journey, noting distances, phrases, descriptions of people. They found also a kind of writing-tablet on which jottings could be made in pencil and erased. CL records, in his public account, how he showed a Lapp some of his drawings. The man “was alarmed at the sight, took off his cap, bowed, and remained with his head down and his hand on his breast as if in veneration, muttering to himself and trembling as if he were just going to faint …” Scholars have generally supposed that the Lapp thought that the