s, his inveterate enemies; biting he laughed, and laughing bit;
eat nothing fasting, and fasted eating nothing; mumbled upon suspicion,
drank by imagination, swam on the tops of high steeples, dried his clothes
in ponds and rivers, fished in the air, and there used to catch decumane
lobsters; hunted at the bottom of the herring-pond, and caught there
ibexes, stamboucs, chamois, and other wild goats; used to put out the eyes
of all the crows which he took sneakingly; feared nothing but his own
shadow and the cries of fat kids; used to gad abroad some days, like a
truant schoolboy; played with the ropes of bells on festival days of
saints; made a mallet of his fist, and writ on hairy parchment
prognostications and almanacks with his huge pin-case.

Is that the gentleman? said Friar John. He is my man; this is the very
fellow I looked for. I will send him a challenge immediately. This is,
said Pantagruel, a strange and monstrous sort of man, if I may call him a
man. You put me in mind of the form and looks of Amodunt and Dissonance.
How were they made? said Friar John. May I be peeled like a raw onion if
ever I heard a word of them. I'll tell you what I read of them in some
ancient apologues, replied Pantagruel.

Physis--that is to say, Nature--at her first burthen begat Beauty and
Harmony without carnal copulation, being of herself very fruitful and
prolific. Antiphysis, who ever was the counter part of Nature,
immediately, out of a malicious spite against her for her beautiful and
honourable productions, in opposition begot Amodunt and Dissonance by
copulation with Tellumon. Their heads were round like a football, and not
gently flatted on both sides, like the common shape of men. Their ears
stood pricked up like those of asses; their eyes, as hard as those of
crabs, and without brows, stared out of their heads, fixed on bones like
those of our heels; their feet were round like tennis-balls; their arms and
hands turned backwards towards their shoulders; and they walked on their
heads, continually turning round like a ball, topsy-turvy, heels over head.

Yet--as you know that apes esteem their young the handsomest in the world
--Antiphysis extolled her offspring, and strove to prove that their shape
was handsomer and neater than that of the children of Physis, saying that
thus to have spherical heads and feet, and walk in a circular manner,
wheeling round, had something in it of the perfection of the divine power