The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson: review In 1957, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges published The Book of Imaginary Beings, "a handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination." It featured established mythological celebrities like dragons and centaurs, and several lesser known creatures including the lamed wufniks (36 religious men who, should they become aware that they are one of the lamed wufniks, die and are replaced by another lamed wufnik), the pinnacle grouse (which lays square eggs and flies on a single wing around the top of a solitary mountain) and the squonk, which roams the hemlock forests of Pennsylvania lamenting the state of its terrible skin. Now, Caspar Henderson has followed it up with a collection as fabulous as anything Borges ever conceived. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings features black sorcerers and cutthroat eels, pot-bellied gravyboats and smallspine spookfishes, fathead congregants and lawless dawn-nymphs. There is the octopod family, including Wunderpus photogenicus, which lives its life underwater in dazzled imitation of a Bridget Riley, the mimic octopus, which shape-shifts at will to make itself a flounder or a stingray, and the glass octopus, which looks like nothing at all. The point being, of course, that while Borges's bestiary was imaginary, Henderson's is completely real. In three millennia of energetic human imagining, nothing has got close to the splendour of a manakin bird's moonwalk or the fidelity of a wandering albatross. Novelists would never suggest that one species of sea creature (dolphins) deliberately provoke another (pufferfish) into inflating so that they can be used for aquatic football practice, or propose an organism like the waterbear, which can tolerate boiling, freezing, deep space, cosmic rays, and hibernation for 120 years. Borges himself acknowledged as much: "The zoology of dreams," he wrote, "is far poorer than the zoology of the Maker." Though Henderson - a long-time writer on science and the environment - doesn't attribute any of this to a god, he stops well short of the full Dawkins Science-Is-The-One-True-Faith. The point, he believes, is not to fight about how this world got here, but to delight in the fact that it did. And science is useful because understanding why honey badgers gnaw off each others" testicles or how jumping spiders process the information provided by their eight eyes is a good way to lessen the distance between them and us. Astonishment and celebration flourish when rooted in appreciation of what can be explained. Many chapters end with the kicker of environmental guilt. Leatherback turtles, who hold within their history something like 100 million years of oceanic memory, are within seconds of extinction through hunting or long-lining. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, 99 per cent of the sperm and blue whale population was killed for their by-products. On Macquarie Island between Tasmania and Antarctica, royal penguins used to be forced to walk the plank at the rate of 4,000 a day into giant digesters, rendering their fat into binder twine. What stops this from becoming a conventional zoological doom-fest is the bounce of his writing and the breadth of his knowledge. Each entry not only reads as an essay on the peculiarities of yeti crabs or axolotls, but becomes instead an inquiry into the nature of seeing or walking or being. It is, says Henderson, a "deliberate attempt to use the animals to think with." So what starts as an entry on the nautilus - a shell-dwelling mollusc which creeps from chamber to chamber like a Mayfair spinster - expands into a piece on ballistic missiles, flotation tanks and the early history of photography. Henderson's omnivorous enthusiasm for this world is infectious. One of the many charms of this lovely book is his skill in picking quotes from everything and everyone who might better illustrate his point, from Billy Connolly to Werner Herzog. He starts with Bertrand Russell: "The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." But perhaps the best summary of Henderson's achievement is another quote, this time from the poet Norman MacCaig - just substitute book for poem and world for girl. I remember the so many people/ dying of horizons, dying of a surfeit/of moderation:/ and I think - Girl,/ I'll write you a poem/ that praises you so well/ it'll glow in the dark. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings Caspar Henderson Granta, £25, 427pp