an engraving from athanasius kircher's book "china monumentis, qua sacris qua profanis" (1666) describes the "sumxu" as cat-like, but the illustration resembled a small bear with a bushy tail. the engraving is clearly based on a picture in boym's "flora sinensis", where the picture is captioned as 松鼠 in chinese (this is chinese for "squirrel"; the word is transcribed "songshu" in modern hanyu pinyin, but "sumxu" was the standard way of transcribing these syllables in the 17th century jesuit literature) and "sum xu" in latin. kircher's description, if not sheer fantasy, may have been based on reports of other writers (as detailed below) who refer to the creature as a droop-eared cat.