The collection of the Royal Society contains many strange and curious artifacts, and you now hold in your hands the first printing of one of the most eccentric texts. The author presented his narrative to the Society’s President and Council in 1671, with the stipulation that the work be only available to Society Council members and then only those researching the more bizarre aspects of natural history. The work was not to be released to the public for three centuries and thirty years, a request as strange as this narrative.
In the eighteenth century zoology, taxonomy, and the classification of species, would find their beginnings with the works of Linnaeus; comparative anatomy, and its offspring paleontology was later to be born of the works of Cuvier. When Dr. Christopher Lemuel, a naturalist as well as physician, set sail from Portsmouth in 1665 on the British privateer Worcester, he may have known that large fossilized bones had been found in Britain and on the Continent, but was unlikely to have had an inkling as to what sort of creatures they belonged to. This ignorance, strangely enough, has added an element of verisimilitude to his story, as you shall see.
We have taken the liberty of modernizing some of Dr. Lemuel’s spelling and period literary quirks – he had the tendency of the times of Capitalization For Emphasis, as well as the haphazard period spelling; for example the word pistol is spelled variously as “pistoll” and “pistolle” throughout the original.
