Seeing things

So as part of my dissertation research I'm going through various early books and letters describing the oddities of the natural world in Southeast Asia. The current one is particularly cool -- it's a printed book from about 1700 in which the author has collected material from various other books, letters, and treatises (and when I say collected, I mean plagiarized). He then had them illustrated and printed and sold them as a sort of coffee table book for polite society. The analogy is pretty good actually, since coffee had just been introduced to Europe and this is probably just the sort of thing that you would discuss at your local coffee house.

Some of the illustrations in this book particularly cool:

I mean, eagles with moustaches and tropical birds with teeth?!

Clearly what happened is that a set of field sketches were delivered the printer who had to have the illustrations cut into metal plates for printing. The artist in charge of this was apparently a little confused by what he was seeing, and just changed things around so that they looked better. Thus, the dead mouse in the eagle's mouth becomes a moustache and the...well I don't know why the toucan has giant teeth.



Still not convinced, check this out:

Our engraver gets a drawing of a monkey with its young clinging it. It doesn't look like the little guy has a very good grip, so the artist helpfully tied him on with a piece of vine. I think the mother's expression says it all.