Books: Collected Curios

ANIMAL TALES (510 pp.)—Compiled by Ivan J. Sanderson—Knopf ($5).

In 1900 a prehistoric mammoth was discovered in the ice of northern Siberia. Russian and German scientists hastened to study the body, then approximately 50,000 years old. Other frozen Pleistocene Age mammals had been found from time to time, but this one was so well preserved that half-chewed leaves and grasses still clung to its teeth. Its hide was covered with long, reddish-brown woolly hair. The hind legs measured nearly 50 inches from sole to knee, and weighed about 350 pounds each. The scientists had the “great satisfaction,” one of them reported, of finding even the genitals “in the best possible condition. . . . We stood speechless in front of this evidence of the prehistoric world.”

This frozen-mammoth report is one of the many curious items in Animal Tales. Young (35) British Naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson has gathered material from all over the world for his anthology—sober science as well as “impossible fantastic fiction.” In an elaborate series of prefatory remarks, he tries to explain and analyze his selections. The best of them need no analysis; the worst are merely gushy pieces about friendly yaks and darling koala bears. Among the best selections:

¶ Francis Trevelyan Buckland’s notes on British rats, from his Curiosities of Natural History.

¶ Archibald S. (“Grey Owl”) Belaney’s account of two housebroken Canadian beavers.

¶ Jean-Henri Fabre’s observations on the life and loves of the Languedoc scorpion.

¶ W. H. Hudson’s Biography of the Vizcacha, an Argentine burrowing rodent, from his Naturalist in La Plata.