The Beastiary A Book of Beasts Author:T.H. White by T.H White, author of THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, with more than One Hundred and Twenty-Five Illustrations, ("astonishingly clever and often most beautiful in design") from the original medieval manuscripts... — "A Bestiary is a serious work of natural history, and is one of the bases upon which our own knowledge of biology is founded, however mu... more »ch we may have advanced since it was written.
There is no particular author of a bestiary. It is a compilation, a kind of naturalist's scrapbook, which has grown with the additions of several hands. Its sources go back to the distant past, to the Fathers of the Church, to Rome, to Greece, to Egypt, to mythology, ultimately to oral tradition which must have been contemporary with the caves of Cromagnon. Its influence has extended throughout literature and...country people are still repeating some of its saws..." T.H. White, Notes« less