WHAT CHILD IS THIS?

[Certainly not the one you would expect this time of year!]

"At Cracovia there was born of noble parents a that was child terrible to behold, with flaming and shining eyes, the mouth and nostril were like to those of an ox; it had long horns, and a back hairy like a dog's; it had the faces of apes in the breast, where the teats should stand; it had cat's eyes under the navel, fastened to the hypogastrium, and they looked hideously and frightfully; it had the heads of dogs on both elbows, and at the whirlbones of each knee, looking forward; it was splay-footed, splay-handed, the feet were like swan's feet, and it had a tail turned upwards that was crooked, about half an ell long.  It lived four hours from the birth of it, and near it death it spake thus:  'Watch, for the Lord your God comes.'  'This was,' sayeth Lycosthenes, 'A.D. 1543.' "

-- Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World, 1678 (reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1952)