Here's a plumed serpent from a "Preliminary Account of an Expedition to the Cliff Villages of the Red Rock Country, and the Tusayan Ruins of Sikyatki and Awatobi, Arizona, in 1895," by J. Walter Fewkes, in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution.

"The first heaven, that of the Moon, is guarded by the lowest order of angels" (in Dante's Paradiso, as noted in The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories), and here's what it looks like.  A guard stands before Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt's moon model at the Field Columbian Museum, 1898.

Here's Monkey Santa from 1895.

From Cassell's, 1894.

"The British habit of laughing at a joke five minutes after it is uttered."  From "As Others See Us," Cassell's, 1894.

"Stay, morning has not come, / and night has not closed. / Time grows thin, / the two to be equalled, / and quiet returns" —A Gabriela Mistral Reader, 1993.  Our thin grandfather clock appears in Chambers's New Geographical Readers, 1891.

"The hobby-horse and the safety bicycle," from The Brighton Road: Old Times and New on a Classic Highway by Charles George Harper, 1892.

How many times have we been beleaguered by eagles and goats simultaneously?  From Castle Rackrent and The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth, 1895.

The Black Cat, from March, 1896.

From Deirdre by Thomas William Hazen Rolleston, 1897.

"Woman with a rabbit's head listening to a man with a dog's head playing a horn."  Circa 1890.

Here's a "Pluto Water" baseball spinner, ca. 1895.

"Yes Hubby I recognize your dear voice," from an ad for Wilson's Syrup of Tar, c. 1890.

Here's the earliest "sphinx/thinx" pun we've been able to dig up: ""The mysterious sphinx: who know what he thinx?"  From Grip, 1891.

But there have been some echoes along the way:

The reporters go up to the sphinx

And demand to know just what it thinx

     Of the Philippine Isles;

     But the sphinx only smiles

And replies: "That's a secret, by jinx!"

—The Indianapolis News, 1900

That granite-faced dub called the Sphinx

Has missed many thousands of drinx,

     But equals, perhaps,

     A great many chaps,

In the number of thunks that he thinx!

—William Frederick Kirk, Fleeting Fancies, 1904

Even the enigmatic old sphinx winx as he thinx of the most exhilarating of drinx.

—The Capuchin Annual, 1949

The toffy head waiter with the face of a sphinx

These are a few of my least favorite thinx.

—Bulletin with Newsweek, 1981

The Publisher mysterious enigmatic Sphinx.

The Editor in oracles of rejection thinx.

—Marjorie Bovee, A Soul in Search of Itself, 1999

From c. 1890.

The umlaut over the second O is here revealed to refer to rabbit ears.  From The Oölogist, 1896.