414 CARSON— THE TRIAL OF ANIMALS AND INSECTS. 



sion as proved by the legend by which devils left the lunatic and 

 entered the herd of swine which pitched itself into the sea. Beel- 

 zebub was incarnate in all night beasts, especially if they happened 

 to be black. If Pythagoras was right in teaching, " that souls of 

 animals infuse themselves into the trunks of men," what wonder 

 was it that Gratiano exclaimed to Shylock : 



" Thy currish spirit 

 Govern'd a wolf, who, hanged for human slaughter, 

 Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet. 

 And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhallowed dam, 

 Infused itself in thee; for thy desires 

 Are wolfish, bloody, sterved and ravenous." 



In explanation of the judicial proceedings so solemnly resorted 

 to in the trial, conviction and punishment of animals, a Swiss jurist, 

 Edward Osenbriiggen, in 1868, advanced and maintained the thesis, 

 that they can only be understood on the theory of the personifica- 

 tion of animals : that as only a human being can commit crime and 

 thus render himself liable to punishment, it is only by an act of 

 personification that the brute can be placed in the same category as 

 man and become subject to the same penalties; and he regarded 

 the Basel cock as a personified heretic, and therefore properly 

 burned at the stake. 



Mr. Evans regards this as purely fanciful, and concludes that 

 "the judicial prosecution of animals, resulting in their excommuni- 

 cation by the Church or their execution by the hangman, had its 

 origin in the common superstition of the age, which has left such a 

 tragical record of itself in the incredibly absurd and atrocious an- 

 nals of witchcraft. The same ancient code that condemned a homi- 

 cidal ox to be stoned, declared that a witch should not be suffered to 

 live, and although the Jewish law giver may have regarded the for- 

 mer enactment chiefly as a police regulation designed to protect per- 

 sons against unruly cattle, it was, like the decree of death against 

 witches, genetically connected *with the Hebrew cult and had there- 

 fore an essentially religious character. It was these two paragraphs 

 of the Mosaic law that Christian tribunals in the Middle Ages were 



