On the left a sea-creature sighted between Antibes and Nice in 1562 as reported by the naturalist Conrad Gesner; on the right Jorges Luis Borges, unsighted since 1986.

In The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, (1952) Borges mentions… 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into 

a) those that belong to the emperor; 
b) embalmed ones; 
c) those that are trained; 
d) suckling pigs; 
e) mermaids; 
f) fabulous ones; 
g) stray dogs; 
h) those that are included in this classification; 
i) those that tremble as if they were mad; 
j) innumerable ones; 
k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; 
l) etcetera; 
m) those that have just broken the flower vase; 
n) those that at a distance resemble flies.

—— 

In his 1565 Book on Fossil Objects, Chiefly Stones and Gems, their Shapes and Appearances, Conrad Gesner classified fossils into:

Those whose forms are based upon, have some relation to, or suggest the geometrical conception of points, lines or angles
Those which resemble or derive their name from some heavenly body or from on of the Aristotelian elements
Those which take their name from something in the sky
Those which are named after inanimate terrestrial objects
Those which bear a resemblance to certain artificial things
Things made artificially out of metals, stones, or gems
Those which resemble plants or herbs
Those which have the form of shrubs
Those which resemble trees or portions of trees
Corals
Other sea plants which have a stony nature
Those which have some resemblance to men or to four-footed animals, or are found within these
Stones which derive their names from birds
Those which have a resemblance to things which live in the sea
Those which resemble insects or serpents 

Extraordinary revelations and fragile speculations require a language of Wonder that is unfamiliar in the modern laboratory. We have become a measuring species. Our effects are all prefigured by the causes we have acknowledged and our answers are constrained by the terms of our questioning. It wasn’t always so.