108 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



thoughts only were real, and all attempts to gain the secrets of 

 Nature were considered useless and contemptible. And, strange as 

 it may seem, the authority appealed to in support of these views 

 was Aristotle himself — not the Aristotle as he was known in 

 Greece and as he has come to be known later, but the Aristotle as 

 he appeared under a double Arabian and Latin disguise. His 

 commentators had no hesitation in ascribing to him just the con- 

 trary to what he had advanced. He was to be made orthodox at 

 any price. 



All knowledge of Nature that was accidentally unearthed was 

 made to bear a theological import. Even the philosopher's stone 

 was made a theological agent. It was supposed to be able to free 

 man from sin. The search for the stone was commended, since 

 God had promised it to all good Christians, and that passage from 

 Revelation, "To the conqueror I will give a white stone/' was 

 quoted in support of this view. Even zoology was obstructed 

 with miracles and legends, as witness the wide-spread popularity 

 for centuries throughout Europe of that curious book the Physi- 

 ologus, or the Beastiary. Without a doubt this book contains a 

 greater number of errors to the page than any other treatise on 

 natural history ever published. It had its origin in the early 

 Christian centuries, when the tendency was to interpret the Bible 

 in an allegorical method, especially resorted to in the earlier com- 

 mentaries on the account of creation in Genesis. 



Among the most astonishing of the statements of this remark- 

 able authority on natural history are the following: "The lion 

 (footprints rubbed out with the tail; sleeps with eyes open, 

 cubs receive life only three days after birth by their father's 

 breath) ; the sun-lizard (restores its sight by looking at the sun) '■> 

 the pelican (recalls its young to life by its own blood) ; the eagle 

 (renews its youth by sunlight and bathing in a fountain) ; the 

 phcenix (revives from fire) ; the viper (born at the cost of both its 

 parents' death) ; the serpent (sheds its skin ; puts aside its venom 

 before drinking ; is afraid of man in a state of nudity ; hides its 

 head and abandons the rest of the body) ; the hedgehog (pricks 

 grapes upon its quills) ; the panther (spotted skin ; enmity to the 

 dragon; sleeps for three days after meals; allures its prey by 

 sweet odor) ; the sea-tortoise (mistaken by sailors for an island) ; 

 the hyena (a hermaphrodite) ; the otter (enters the crocodile's 

 mouth to kill it) ; the salamader (quenches fire) ; the tree called 

 peridexion (protects pigeons from the serpent by its shadow) ; the 

 fire-flints (of two sexes ; combine to produce fire)." 



It was not because there was nothing better than this book 

 that it gained such a popularity, for there were the works of Pliny 

 and those of Aristotle, though abridged and perverted from their 

 original meaning by commentators. It was because the mind of 



