Great Throughts Treasury

"Each truth sparkles with a light of its own, yet it always reflects some light upon another; a truth, while lighting another, springs from one, in order to penetrate another. The first truth is an abundant sense, from which all others are colored, and each particular truth, in its turn, resembles a great river that divides into an infinite number of rivulets."

"Nonetheless, in making this comparison, I do not with to insinuate that Esau was a Satyr, nor that this race of savage animals has descended from him. I consider Esau as a monstrous man."

"An observation of the year 1718, there in a cave on a very high mountain, called Ober-Urner-Schwendi, there were found some bones, declared as the remains of a dragon, but after my judgement these are nothing more than the remains of a bear, which maybe had his winter accommodation in the cave, and because of the collapse of the entrance had must died by starvation."

"At last I must mention that furious rivers from the mountains are called by the locals of the Alps also dragons. If a river flows down from the mountains, and carries large stone, trees and other things with it, so they say: The dragon became unchained...[]... that many wrong stories about the dragons have their source in this fact. However I assume, that by comparison with the dragons from the Swiss and foreign [countries], that such animals exist, they could be a rare species of animals, or, as many say, deformed snakes, because not all are of same kind, some have wings, other are without limbs, who will be attributed to snakes, other have limbs, so that we should compare them to lizards. They differ also in colour, scales and form of the [body-] parts."