Here's a precursor to the Energizer Bunny.  The caption reads, "A walking battery."  From Roughing It by Mark Twain.

Though we don't exactly sit on a coffin waiting for someone to support our creative endeavors, we actually have on more than one occasion sensed the earth yawning beneath our feet.

Hegel's "bovine darkness"* is depicted in The Quiver, 1875. The caption reads, "Everything seemed to grow dark about him."

*Compare to Schelling's Indifferenzpunkt, the night in which all cows are black.

An illustration from Na úsvitě nové doby by Josef Jakub Touzimsky (1898).  Speaking of which, what exactly are a snowball's chances in hell?  See A Snowball's Chance in Hell.

"The Haunted House": an illustration from The Leisure Hour (1881).  The poem reads:

"Cod [with a C] is love": note that in this unretouched image from The Quiver, 1875, it's a large marine fish with a small barbel on the chin that is love.

David Watmough explains: "COD IS LOVE seemed more germane ... as a source to pray to than obeisance to some remote and distinctly unfishy deity" (The Moor is Dark Beneath the Moon, 2002).

Originally, the E of e-mail stood for eagle. From What Was the Gunpowder Plot by John Gerard (1897).  The caption reads: "The gallant Eagle, soaring up on high."

An illustration from The Oxford Thackeray.  The caption reads: "Without his hat. ... In his comic hat."

An illustration from an 1879 issue of The Quiver magazine.  The caption reads: "And then the mystic tide between us rolls."

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Wide World magazine.  The caption reads: "He saw by the corner of the tomb the flaming head of a 'Bhut.'"

This "old-fashioned break-down," from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1883), predates by three years Sigmund Freud's private practice specializing in nervous disorders.

Here's a precursor to Ayn Rand, from The Quiver, 1875.  The caption reads, "I really cannot take upon myself the burden of your support."

Although fables do not have to contain animals, animals are repositories of fables.  Also, did you know that a swan song can be a story told to a swan?  From Little Loving Hearts Poem Book by Margaret Elenora Tupper, 1882.  The caption reads, "Come and tell me your story."

An illustration from an 1885 issue of Frank Leslie's Pleasant Hours magazine.

"I wonder what book she can have fallen asleep over."  (From The Quiver, 1888.)

There's only one picture on the internet of a badger on bamboo, and that picture was printed upside down in its source -- Young Americans in Japan by Edward Greey, 1882.

The last non-deceiving mirror was manufactured in 1835, just before German chemist Justus von Liebig developed a process for silvering the rear surface of glass.  No silvered mirror's reflection can be trusted; only polished discs of bronze or copper or small glass mirrors backed by lead, tin, or antimony neither flatter nor deceive.