Hircocervus
The
hircocervus or
tragelaph, also known as a
goat-stag or
horse-stag, was a legendary creature imagined to be half-goat, half-stag. In his work De Interpretatione, Aristotle utilized the idea of a fabulous goat-stag to express the philosophical concept of something that is knowable even though it does not really exist. The word
hircocervus first appears in the English language in a medieval manuscript dating from 1398. A hircocervus is depicted in a wall-painting called
The Trusty Servant, painted by John Hoskins in 1579. dating from the 1580s. It hangs outside the kitchen of Winchester College in Hampshire, England. The author Arthur Cleveland Coxe described "the time-honoured
Hircocervus, or picture of 'the Trusty-servant,' which hangs near the kitchen, and which emblematically sets forth those virtues in domestics, of which we Americans know nothing. It is a figure, part man, part porker, part deer, and part donkey; with a padlock on his mouth, and various other symbols in his hands and about his person, the whole signifying a most valuable character.