Jenny Hanivers

Nine years ago a certain Mr. Altman of Brooklyn visited an old colonial house purchased long before by his father and now ready for the wreckers. Prowling through the empty rooms he stopped and stared at a strange thing hanging over a mantel. Nearly a foot long and apparently mummified, it had two widespread, goatish feet, a curling tail, flaps of tissue extending from its body like wings, a grotesque caricature of a human face with plump cheeks, beady eyes, a pursed, smirking mouth (see cut).

Mr. Altman took the monster to Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History and laid it on the desk of Ichthyologist Eugene Willis Gudger. Dr. Gudger had never seen such a thing before but he is versed in old and curious lore, knew instantly what it was. It was, he told Mr. Altman, a "Jenny Haniver." Dr. Gudger photographed the thing, began a systematic collation of data on Jenny Hanivers, ancient and modern, which last week he published in the June Scientific Monthly.

Jenny Hanivers are made from the dried carcasses of small rays and skates. In natural state the underside of a ray's head slightly resembles a monstrous human face with nostrils that seem to be eyes and a wide, toothed mouth. The human effect is heightened when beads are inserted in the nostrils and the tissue artfully mutilated. The pectoral fins can be cut away from the head and moulded into a headdress resembling a bishop's mitre. The ventral fins can be distorted to resemble feet. Neither Dr. Gudger nor an Australian colleague investigating the same subject could learn the origin of the term "Jenny Haniver" which appears in no standard dictionary.

Natural histories of the 16th Century broke into a rash of stories about marvelous fish shaped like men. Pierre Belon, author of the world's first treatise on fish (De Aquatilibus; 1553), furnished a drawing of a "monkfish" captured in Norway, a creature in scaly but clerical garb with a human face, a monk's shaven crown, vague appendages for arms and a fish's tail. It lived three days, the author averred, uttering lamentations. A contemporary ichthyologist named Guillaume Rondelet reproduced a drawing which he claimed had been sent him by Marguerite d'Anglouleme, Queen of Navarre (The Heptameron). It represented a "bishop-fish" which, though scaly, had distinct arms and legs, a pointed head and a sly look. When shown to the King of Poland the bishopfish made "vehement signs" indicating a desire to return to the water, and it was put back in the sea. At about the same time an alert Swiss naturalist named Conrad Gesner published the first unmistakable illustration of a Jenny Hani-ver--a flying dragon--and reported that vendors of quack medicines used such things to impress their customers. In succeeding centuries Italian and French scientists furnished depictions of other specimens, some very elaborate, and museums began to acquire them. Dr. Gudger unearthed two very recent cases of Jenny Haniver fabrication. Five years ago an Allentown, Pa. cobbler-fisher-man announced he had caught a fish with a human face, got his story in the newspapers and interested Muhlenberg College scientists. Last year a Bronx man went to Dr. Gudger with an 18-inch Jenny bought from a Swedish fisherman in Florida and made from a guitarfish. Dr. Gudger holds it impossible that these two illiterate fabricators had ever heard of Jenny Hanivers, believes that, like the early makers, they discovered a faint human resemblance in the fish and experienced an obscure impulse to accentuate it.

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