NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 729 



monkish preachers. The phoenix rising from his ashes proves 

 the doctrine of the resurrection ; the structure and mischief of 

 monkeys prove the existence of demons ; the fact that certain 

 monkeys have no tails proves that Satan has been shorn of 

 his glory ; the weasel, which " constantly changes its place, is a 

 type of the man estranged from the word of God, who findeth 

 no rest." 



The moral treatises of the time often took the form of works 

 on natural history, in order the more fully to exploit these re- 

 ligious teachings of Nature. Thus from the Dominican Thomas 

 of Cantimi^rd, who called his book De Apibus (On Bees), we learn 

 that " the wasps persecute the bees and make war on them out of 

 natural hatred " ; and these, he tells us, tyjiif y the demons who 

 dwell in the air and with lightning and tempest assail and vex 

 mankind whereupon he fills a long chapter with anecdotes of such 

 demonic warfare on mortals. In like manner his fellow-Domini- 

 can, the inquisitor Nider, in his book the Ant Hill, teaches us 

 that the ants in Ethiopia, which are said to have horns and to 

 grow so large as to look like dogs, are emblems of atrocious here- 

 tics, like Wyclif and the Hussites, who bark and bite against the 

 truth ; while the ants of India, which dig up gold out of the 

 sand with their feet and hoard it, though they make no use of 

 it, symbolize the fruitless toil with which the heretics dig out 

 the gold of Holy Scrij)ture and hoard it in their books to no 

 purpose. 



This pious spirit not only pervaded science, it bloomed out in 

 art, and it meets us especially in the cathedrals. In the gargoyles 

 overhanging the walls, in the grotesques clambering about the 

 towers or perched upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowling under 

 archways or lurking in bosses of foliage, in the apocalyptic beasts 

 carved upon the stalls of the choir, stained into the windows, 

 wrought into the tapestries, illuminated in the letters and borders 

 of psalters and missals, these marvels of creation suggested every- 

 where morals from the Physiologus, the Bestiaries, and the Ex- 

 empla.* 



* For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Teratologiques ; 

 also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiary of Guillaume de Normandie, Caen, 1852, and such 

 mediaeval books of Exempla as the Lumen Naturae ; also Hoefer, Histoire de la Zoologie ; 

 also Rambaud, Histoire de la CiviUsation rran9aise, Paris, 1885, vol. i, pp. 368, 369; also 

 Cardinal Pitra, preface to the Spicilegium Solisraense, Paris, 1855, passim; also Carus, 

 Geschichte der Zoologie ; and for an admirable summary, the article Physiologus in the 

 Encyc. Brit. In the illuminated manuscripts in the Library of Cornell University are some 

 very striking examples of grotesques. For admirably illustrated articles on the Bestiaries, 

 see Cahier and Martin, Melanges d'Archeologie, Paris, 1851, 1852, and 1856, vol. ii of the 

 first series, pp. 85-232, and second series, volume on Curiosites Mysterieuses, pp. 106-164 ; 

 also J. R. Allen, Early Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland (London, ISS*?), 



