Bestiarium Ignotum

(Lat., "Unknown Bestiary") The suppressed natural-history book of the famous 18th-century Swedish botanist and taxonomist, Carolus or Carl Linnaeus.

No one is sure whether some wizard of the botanist's acquaintance tipped him off to the existence of the Atlantean rafting project, or whether he himself deduced that there were some lifeforms in Europe which seemed to have few similarities (or tremendous differences) from the native species. But during Linnaeus's stay in Amsterdam in the early 1730's, when he was working on classification of new species with Professor Johan Burman in the city's botanical garden, he apparently began the first jottings on some odd creatures he had seen during his travels outside Sweden some years before, during the period he had been acquiring his MD. As so often happens, the jottings grew and grew as other scientists got wind of what Linnaeus was doing, and started sending him odd specimens to classify.

Linnaeus felt understandably uncomfortable letting anyone know about this dabbling in the taxonomy of the weirder side of the European animal kingdomwhat he was doing. Like many other scientists of the time, he was working in a system in which one's food and lodging usually depended on the good will of a wealthy patron. He therefore kept his research into the wizardly fauna of Europe under wraps. For a long time he was fortunate in that his patrons usually had extensive estates in which it was easy to retire to some remote shed hidden out at the estate's far fringes and do a little discreet dissection (in the case of the dead specimens) or observation (in the case of the living ones).

This period came to an abrupt end in 1737, shortly after the publication of Linnaeus's Critica Botanica, when a specimen basilisk escaped from its cage in the private botanical garden of the Dutch East India Company's Georg Clifford (where Linnaeus was then doing classification work) and wrought the predictable havoc in the neighborhood. Shortly afterwards, it was given out that Linnaeus was suffering from exhaustion -- probably he was, having had to chase the basilisk over a significant acreage of Noord-Holland before he managed to catch it again -- and the botanist left for Leiden and Paris.

He continied to publish during this period -- but the one book which he was becoming increasingly interested in seeing published was one which no publisher would touch. The excuse was always that the publisher was afraid of becoming a laughing-stock: in that most aggressive period of the Enlightenment, no one cared to be seen taking too much interest in creatures which everyone preferred to believe were mythical. At least one of Linnaeus's patrons, the warned him that, in the present intellectual climate, he was in danger of damaging his career -- to further which he had gone traveling in the first place: the father of his intended bride had insisted that he make enough of a reputation for himself by his work to be able to support a family.

Linnaeus, reluctantly, took the hint, and went home to Sweden, where he married and settled down. But the project would not let him alone. He added material to it for many years afterwards; every now and then, some strange crate or shrouded cage would turn up at the Linnaeus homestead and be whisked away into the private workshop to which even his wife and children were never admitted.