Read "The Mermecolion" by Jorge Luis Borges online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The Mermecolion is an inconceivable animal defined by Flaubert in this way: ‘lion in its foreparts, ant in its hindparts, with the organs of its sex the wrong way'. The history of this monster is also strange. In the Scriptures (Job IV: II) we read: ‘The old lion perisheth for lack of prey. ' The Hebrew text has layish for lion; this word, an uncommon one for the lion, seems to have produced an equally uncommon translation. The Septuagint version, harking back to an Arabian lion that Aelian and Strabo call myrmex, forged the word Mermecolion. After centuries, the origin of this was forgotten. Myrmex, in Greek, means ant; out of the puzzling words The ant-lion perisheth for lack of prey' grew a fantasy (translated below by T. H. White) that medieval bestiaries succeeded in multiplying:
The Physiologus said: It had the face (or fore-part) of a lion and the hinder parts of an ant. Its father eats flesh, but its mother grains. If then they engender the ant-lion, they engender a thing of two natures, such that it cannot eat flesh because of the nature of its mother, nor grains because of the nature of its father. It perishes, therefore, because it has no nutriment.