The six volumes of Jan Jonston’s Natural History (Historiae naturalis libri), written by the physician and scholar from Leszno, summarized the zoological knowledge of Europe in the mid-17th century.

Moreover, thanks to collaboration with the famous engraver Matthäus Merian and his family workshop, Jonston included thousands of images of animals in his books. Without exaggeration, we could consider Jonston’s work as the first animal atlas, aiming to encompass all known species at the time and gather all zoological knowledge.

Jonston did not intend to make scientific discoveries or revolutions; his Natural History aimed to gather available information and present it in an organized form, additionally enriched with numerous engravings. He was perhaps inspired by the innovative concepts and teaching methods of Jan Ámos Komenský, the creator of the first illustrated textbooks. Komenský was the principal of a gymnasium in Leszno, where Jonston taught. They were united by the Protestant work and education ethos: Komenský led the Czech Brethren community, and Jonston’s father was a Calvinist refugee from Scotland. We can even see Jonston’s influences in Komenský’s famous Orbis pictus.

Starting in 1650, successive volumes of Jan Jonston’s Natural History were published by the Merian printing house in Frankfurt.

Five books about fish and whales – as well as other marine mammals and legendary sea monsters.

Four books about ‘bloodless aquatic animals’ – meaning aquatic invertebrates: mollusks, cephalopods, crustaceans, echinoderms, or cnidarians.

The next four – about quadrupeds, mainly mammals (among them will also be griffins and unicorns), but also reptiles and amphibians.

Six books about birds (including bats). Here, mythical creatures like harpies, phoenixes, and griffins were considered fictional.

Jonston dedicated three books to insects, but by ‘insecta’ he meant arachnids, land mollusks, crustaceans, annelids, and worms. Aquatic invertebrates are also revisited here, and even – quite out of place – seahorses.

The shortest volume consists of two books about snakes and… dragons. Describing the latter, Jonston points out obvious fabrications, namely dragon-shaped specimens prepared from dried rays. Also mentioned are the seven-headed crowned ‘hydras,’ which Linnaeus later exposed as taxidermic preparations intended to represent the Apocalyptic Dragon.

Undoubtedly, until the time of Linnaeus, Jonston’s Natural History was incredibly influential – its visual appeal and Latin text ensured its popularity in schools and academic circles. The work saw many subsequent editions and translations, including pirate copies.

The influence of Jonston’s work extended beyond Europe, as traces of his Natural History can be found in East Asia, in the works of Chinese and Japanese naturalists who copied Merian’s engravings in their own style. One of the Chinese collections of such copies is housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

In Jonston’s volume on quadrupeds, you may come across a peculiar engraving.

It depicts a difficult-to-identify animal surrounded by bones, squeezing between the trunks of two trees while defecating abundantly.

The Latin and German captions reveal the identity of the animal. In Latin, it is called gulo, and in German, Vielfraes – a wolverine. The problem is that it does not resemble a wolverine at all, and moreover, there is no evidence that modern wolverines squeeze through trees while attending to their natural needs. Thus, the illustration in Jonston’s Natural History is not based on observations of nature but on the tradition and authority of earlier scholars. The author himself does not deny this fact and, as a diligent compiler, indicates his sources. Thanks to them, we can trace the creation and transmission of knowledge about the wolverine in early modern Europe.

The wolverine and its strange behavior were first described by Maciej Miechowita, a scholar from the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, who was the rector of the Kraków Academy. In his renowned work at the intersection of geography, history, and ethnography, Treatise on the Two Asian and European Sarmatias we read:

In Lithuania and Muscovy lives a beast unknown elsewhere, most gluttonous and harmful, called the wolverine (rossomaka). It is black, the size of a dog, with a cat-like face, and in body and tail it resembles a fox. It feeds on carrion. Once it finds a carcass, it devours everything, filling and swelling like a drum. Then it seeks a narrow passage between trees and squeezes through it, using force to expel what it had earlier greedily consumed. After easing itself in this manner, it immediately goes back to the carrion and fills its stomach again, then empties it and returns to the carcass, continuing this cycle until it has consumed the carrion completely.

The scholar further writes that perhaps nature has given these lands such insatiable creatures because their human inhabitants are equally gluttonous. He then criticizes the custom of immoderate feasting, which, in his opinion, prevails among the nobility of Lithuania, Muscovy, and especially among the Tatars. Thus, one might assume that the wolverine is merely a figment of Miechowita’s imagination, intended to infuse his work with a bit of moralizing in the style of medieval bestiaries.

The note about the wolverine, however, did not escape the attention of Renaissance scholars. The animal appeared in 1539 on the famous Carta Marina – the first detailed map of Scandinavia and the Baltic coasts, delineated and executed by the Swedish humanist Olaus Magnus. The depiction of the wolverine is clearly inspired by Miechowita’s description rather than by nature observation. Moreover, the animal is shown defecating as it squeezes between trees. Olaus repeated the information from the Treatise on the Two Asian and European Sarmatias later in his History of the Northern Peoples, adding that in Scandinavia the animal is called ierff, and in German Vielefrass. Writing in Latin, Olaus decided that in this language the wolverine would be named gulo – which simply means “glutton”.

The authority of the two scholars, Miechowita and Olaus, resulted in the wolverine being depicted in such a form and such an unusual situation for the next two centuries.

From the 18th century, likely due to encounters with American wolverines, accurate depictions of the animal began to appear. Doubts also started to emerge about its eating and excreting habits.

Miechowita’s description and other unusual opinions about the wolverine persisted for a long time. At the dawn of the 19th century, Remigiusz Ładowski in his natural history lexicon Natural History of the Polish Country wrote:

The wolverine, an animal similar in shape to a wolf, is about the size of a dachshund, with a head like that of a cat and a tail resembling that of a fox. Its fur is soft, long, reddish-brown, and black on the back. They are found in the deep forests of Lithuania. They mate in January, sometimes mingling with foxes. [...] They are extremely gluttonous; having seized something, they eat until they topple over and vomit up the food, then they eat again anew, and they repeat this until there is no more food. It is said that after gorging themselves, they go between two tight trees and squeeze until they rid themselves of the food.

And although in some places the belief in the insatiability of the wolverine persisted for a long time, which has survived to this day in its Latin name Gulo gulo, and the story of overeating and squeezing between trees was repeated in didactic children’s books to condemn gluttony, science began to consistently debunk this view. In his zoology textbook from 1821, Feliks Paweł Jarocki, a professor at the University of Warsaw, summarized:

The desire to tell extraordinary tales created the most absurd stories about the gluttony of these animals. Although these clumsy fictions are contrary to common sense, there were such credulous authors among them who, with rare sincerity of soul, included them as truth in their works.

General Joachim Jauch (1684-1754) was a devout Protestant for most of his life. He didn’t celebrate name days, but instead collected entries in his “friendship book” (pol. sztambuch from ger. Stammbuch) from loved ones on his birthdays.

In his commemorative notebook, there are academic studies of ancient sculptures, architectural designs, mythological scenes, sketches, and copies of engravings. Jauch, a Saxon officer sent to Warsaw, quickly rose through the ranks in the military and administration. He is mainly known as the architect responsible for the urban layouts and the design or redesign of many Warsaw buildings. As the Director of the Saxon Construction Office in Warsaw, an engineer, and an artilleryman, he must have seen a lot in his career, and as the author of baroque decorations, he was well acquainted with the entire mythical and fantastical fauna. Surely he was no fool and was not easily deceived. However, a few years before his death, an image of an astounding creature appeared in his diary, accompanied by a lengthy bilingual description.

The Jauch’s friendship book is adorned here and there with naturalistic depictions of plants and animals made by “Fraulein de Naumann” – probably the daughter of architect Johann Christoph von Naumann, Jauch’s predecessor in the director’s office (and privately his brother-in-law). It is precisely among such detailed and graceful drawings, depicting a mole cricket, a salamander, and a locust (on whose wings – according to the description – Hebrew and Greek letters were said to be visible, saying “divine wrath”), that a strange creature was placed, the visage of which could be the most surrealistic self-portrait of Salvador Dalí. The description of the creature is as captivating as its image.

Anno 1749: Such a Locust fell about a mile from Kalisz, from which two were caught, and one is served at the Gniezno Chapter, and the other to the Reformers in Kalisz; when this one was taken in hand, it screeched like a bat, and yellow foam poured from its mouth, it was all hairy like velvet, Death on its chest, two hairy legs, and squirrel-like teeth, etc.

What were the creatures that roamed near Kalisz? Did the author of the drawing (perhaps Jauch himself) see them with his own eyes, stroke their velvety fur, and hear the screeching of bats?

One doesn’t need to be an entomologist to recognize the death’s-head hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos), a moth that owes its species name to the third of the ancient Greek Moirai – mercilessly cutting the thread of human life. It is precisely the countenance of Atropos – sometimes depicted in the form of a dried-up corpse – that prompts pareidolia on the butterfly’s thorax. For this reason, the insect has evoked fear and ominous associations from ancient times to The Silence of the Lambs.

The structure of the proboscis allows the death’s-head hawkmoth to emit a loud, unsettling squeak, which indeed resembles the screeching of a bat. This sound was considered by the British entomologist, Sir Guy Anstruther Knox Marshall, to be the most terrifying feature of the moth. In a tellingly titled article Experimental Evidence of Terror caused by the Squeak of Acherontia atropos, he described an experiment he conducted with the assistance of a tamed vervet monkey on a group of people. The individuals he showed the death’s-head hawkmoth to were not afraid of the insect until it made a sound. Even the brave monkey initially feared the screeching moth until it eventually bit off its head, nervously dismembered it, and when it was sure the moth would not make any more sounds, ate it with relish.

Jauch was not the only one impressed by Acherontia atropos. A somewhat similar, though exaggerated description of the moth can be found in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Sphinx. The melancholic narrator, gazing out of the window at a hill above the banks of the Hudson River, succumbs to an optical illusion and sees a monster:

Estimating the size of the creature by comparison with the diameter of the large trees near which it passed – the few giants of the forest which had escaped the fury of the land-slide – I concluded it to be far larger than any ship of the line in existence. I say ship of the line, because the shape of the monster suggested the idea — the hull of one of our seventy-fours might convey a very tolerable conception of the general outline. The mouth of the animal was situated at the extremity of a proboscis some sixty or seventy feet in length, and about as thick as the body of an ordinary elephant. Near the root of this trunk was an immense quantity of black shaggy hair — more than could have been supplied by the coats of a score of buffalos; and projecting from this hair downwardly and laterally, sprang two gleaming tusks not unlike those of the wild boar, but of infinitely greater dimension. Extending forward, parrallel with the proboscis, and on each side of it was a gigantic staff, thirty or forty feet in length, formed seemingly of pure crystal, and in shape a perfect prism: — it reflected in the most gorgeous manner the rays of the declining sun. The trunk was fashioned like a wedge with the apex to the earth. From it there were outspread two pairs of wings – each wing nearly one hundred yards in length – one pair being placed above the other, and all thickly covered with metal scales; each scale apparently some ten or twelve feet in diameter. I observed that the upper and lower tiers of wings were connected by a strong chain. But the chief peculiarity of this horrible thing, was the representation of a Death’s Head, which covered nearly the whole surface of its breast, and which was as accurately traced in glaring white, upon the dark ground of the body, as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist. While I regarded this terrific animal, and more especially the appearance on its breast, with a feeling of horror and awe – with a sentiment of forthcoming evil, which I found it impossible to quell by any effort of the reason, I perceived the huge jaws at the extremity of the proboscis, suddenly expand themselves, and from them there proceeded a sound so loud and so expressive of wo, that it struck upon my nerves like a knell, and as the monster disappeared at the foot of the hill, I fell at once, fainting, to the floor.

Let’s skip the fact that Acherontia atropos does not occur in North America. The drawing of the “locust” from Kalisz suggests that the author of the drawing probably knew it from reports, but one could just as well assume that the sight of the death’s-head hawkmoth and its squeak – the “sound so loud and so expressive of wo” (or “like a bat”) made as strong an impression on him as it did on the people (and the monkey) in Sir Marshall’s experiment or the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s Sphinx.