There is yet another aspect of Muslim natural history which...

There is yet another aspect of Muslim natural history which is difficult to understand from the modern point of view. It is the description of strange animals and plants and magical properties of nature which the medieval authors seem to have recorded so credulously. One finds similar accounts in ancient books like Pliny's Historia Naturalia. The creatures described in these texts, which appear strange today, are of several types.

One type is of strange animals, especially sea animals, which could certainly have existed but later became very rare or extinct and the description of which, therefore, seems fantastic now for they can no longer be observed.

Another type is of animals and plants like the dragon, unicorn, and mandarine, which originally had symbolic meaning only, but the symbolism of which in certain cases was so forgotten that they came to be erroneously described as living creatures.[^6] As to the apparent frequency of “strange” phenomena within nature and the innocence with which medieval authors recorded them, it must be noted that the minds of those people were not as “hardened” as those of the moderns, and that nature in turn then was not taken to be so “dense” and “coagulated” and far separated from its psychic aspect as now.[^7] Therefore, while reading ancient and medieval texts it should be kept in mind that just as the people of those ages, like the people of certain parts of Asia, Africa, and America today, regarded nature from a point of view different from that of modern science, nature also revealed an aspect of itself to them different from that which it reveals to those moderns whose mental constitution is no longer capable of receiving nature's more subtle elements.

There is, of course, much misinformation due to narrative and exaggerated style characteristic of the poetic mind of many Muslims. But on the whole most of the contents of Muslim natural history can be understood in terms either of direct observation of physical realities or of symbolism, i. e., the description of the subtle aspects of nature the reality of which is not in any way affected because the modern quantitative sciences refuse to consider it from their own peculiar point of view.

B Types of writings which contain material on natural history, particularly on plants and animals that form the centre of our interest in this chapter, are quite diverse.