The Impractical Shelf
Aiton’s called itself a practical reference library — and then shelved sea serpents, mermaids, ghosts and sieve-sailing witches beside the farm accounts and the rules of grammar. Six of the least practical entries in the five volumes, each linking to its page. (For the full tour of gods and monsters, begin at Mythology.)
Sea Serpent
A model of encyclopedic caution: the entry patiently explains away the sightings — seaweed in tide rows, porpoises in single file, twenty-foot ribbon fish — and then leaves the door open with a creak: “Scientists are not ready to deny, however, that the deep sea may still shelter a few monstrous serpents.”
Volume IV
Cock Lane Ghost
London, 1762: knockings at No. 33 Cock Lane, a “luminous figure,” and Dr. Johnson himself writing up the phenomena — before the whole haunting was traced to Mr. Parsons and his little girl. Parsons was pilloried, Johnson was mocked in verse, and “Cock Lane Ghost” became the dictionary term for any purely imaginary fright.
Volume II
Witchcraft
The reference library keeps a straight face through witches passing through keyholes and sailing the ocean in a sieve — then turns grim: the tortured “confession” of Dr. Fian that several hundred witches had sailed from Leith in a sieve to storm King James’s bride home, and the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1797 still vouching for demoniacal possession. The entry’s account of the Salem madness carries this site’s 2026 Editor’s Note.
Volume V
Divination
From Roman augurs reading intestines down to New England ladies consulting the Bible with a pin — including the woman who asked whether to turn her dress or dye it, and opened upon “Turn ye, turn ye… for why will ye die?” Tea-leaf reading and parlor palmistry close the entry, filed under useful knowledge.
Volume II
Mermaid
“Until of late a sailor who had not seen a mermaid… forfeited his title as an old tar.” The entry runs from the Lorelei to the sober suggestion that the whole species is a half-seen dugong nursing its young — with cross-references, naturally, to DUGONG and MANATEE.
Volume III
Guillotine
The facts as filed: a German mechanic named Schmidt built eighty-three machines at $100 each, one for every department of France; the knife severs a head “as easily as a sharp razor cuts a hair”; and Dr. Guillotin, who had proposed it as the humane option, was thrown into prison during the Terror and “came very near being a victim of the instrument which bears his name.”
Volume II