Flights

…there is a Nation known as Blemij, which Isidorus calls Lemnios, where men have the figure and the symmetry of our ilk, yet whole heads they have not, rather only faces in the centre of their breasts… Pliny the Elder, meanwhile, that great researcher of the natural world, not only confirms the selfsame sentiment de Acephalis, alias of headless persons, but also situates their close relatives, the Troglodytes, in Ethiopia, a Swart Country. Much of this knowledge these Authors derive from the Momentum of Saint Augustine, oculatis Testis [that is, eye witness], regarding peregrinations in that Country (being Bishop of African Hippo not overly removed thence) and sowing the semina [seeds] of the Holy Christian faith, as he mentions directly in his Sermon in Eremo [in the Desert] to the Augustinian Brotherhood, which he had founded himself: “… I was already Bishop of Hippo, when I went into Ethiopia with some servants of Christ there to preach the Gospel. In this country we saw many men and women without heads, who had two great eyes in their breasts; while the rest of their appendages were akin to our own…” Solinus, that Author invoked so many times already, writes that in the Indian mountains there are people with dogs’ heads and voices, alias barking. Marcus Polus, who surveyed India, asserts that on the Isle of Angamen there are people with dogs’ heads and dogs’ teeth; this is corroborated by Odoricus Aelianus (lib. 10), who situates such people in the deserts and the Forests of Egypt. These human monsters Pliny calls Cynanalogos, while Aulus Gellius and Isidonus call them Cynocephalus, i.e., canine heads…. Prince Mikołay Radziwiłł in his Peregrinations (Third Epistle) admits that he had with him two Cynocephali, that is, persons with canine heads, and that he further imported them to Europe.

Tandem oritur questio [This ultimately begs the question]: Are such monstrous Persons capaces [able] to be saved? Saint Augustine, Oraculum of Hippo, responds thus, that man, wherever he may be born, so long as he be good, and wise, having wisdom in his soul, even diverging from us in form, colour, voice, bearing, has inevitably descended from the first human forebear, Adam, and is thus capax for salvation.

The other one is Melville’s Moby Dick.