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Updated: June 2, 2025
Here also were the monsters, Briareus, with his hundred arms, Hydras hissing, and Chimaeras breathing fire. Aeneas shuddered at the sight, drew his sword and would have struck, but the Sibyl restrained him.
We passed through the forest, and entered the wilderness, which was not less terrible: it consisted of heaps of stones, and ditches between them, out of which crept hydras and vipers, and there flew forth venomous flying serpents.
The heavens were darkened; the thunder rolled; and fierce and blinding lightnings flashed from one corner of the heavens to the other. The earth quaked and rocked from side to side. All monstrous and deformed things shewed themselves, "Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire," enough to cause the stoutest heart to quail.
True vegetable hydras, when you cut down one, ten spring in its place: every separate morsel of the thick and succulent stem has the power of growing anew into a separate cactus. Surprising as this peculiarity seems at first sight, it is only a special desert modification of a faculty possessed in a less degree by almost all plants and by many animals.
In plain English and fact, whether you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the region of respectable whales, herrings, and salmon, to that of tunnies, sciaenas, dorados, and all the gorgons, hydras, and chimaeras dire, which are said to grace the fish-markets of Barcelona or Marseilles. But to this assertion, as to most concerning nature, there are exceptions.
A shop-boy was wiping the fog from the window-panes of the Amour peintre, while curious passers-by threw a look at the prints in vogue, Robespierre squeezing into a cup a heart like a pumpkin to drink the blood, and ambitious allegorical designs with such titles as the Tigrocracy of Robespierre; it was all hydras, serpents, horrid monsters let loose on France by the tyrant.
Poor Galileo! thine illustrious visitor, when his affliction came, could cast his sightless eyeballs inward, and see and tell "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," not "Rocks, caves, lakes, bogs, fens, and shades of death, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire,"
We are shown the stumps of a Lumbriculus, each regenerating its head and living thence-forward as an independent individual; a hydra whose pieces become so many fresh hydras; a sea-urchin's egg whose fragments develop complete embryos: where then, we are asked, was the individuality of the egg, the hydra, the worm?
"An universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds Perverse all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived, Gorgons, and hydras, and chimaeras dire" this would doubtless have been noble writing.
The governor, in fact, was having his hands full, and wrote in January 1672 that "this cursed trade has been so long followed, and there is so many of it, that like weeds or hydras, they spring up as fast as we can cut them down." Some of the recalcitrant freebooters, however, were captured and brought to justice.
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