INTRODUCTORY 1 1 



Thus there was nothing to suggest to Aristotle and others of 

 his time the idea that a transformation of species had been going 

 on through the ages, and even the centuries after him evoked no such 

 idea, nor did there arise new speculations, after the manner of 

 Empedocles, in regard to the origin of the organic world. On the 

 whole, the knowledge of the living world retrograded rather than 

 advanced until the beginning of the Roman Empire. What Aristotle 

 had known was forgotten, and Pliny's work on animals is a catalogue 

 embellished with numerous fables, arranged according to a purely 

 external principle of division. Pliny divided animals into those 

 belonging to earth, water, and air, which is not very much more 

 scientific than if he had arranged them according to the letters of the 

 alphabet. 



During the time of the Roman Empire, as is well known, the 

 knowledge of natural history sank lower and lower; there was no 

 more investigation of nature, and even the physicians lost all scientific 

 basis, and practised onlj" in accordance with their traditional esoteric 

 secrets. As the whole culture of the West gradually disappeared, 

 the knowledge of nature possessed by earlier centuries was also 

 completely lost, and in the first half of the Middle Ages Europeans 

 revealed a depth of ignorance of the natural objects lying about them, 

 which it is difficult for us now to form any conception of. 



Christianity was in part responsible for this, because it regarded 

 natural science as a product of heathendom, and therefore felt bound 

 to look coldly on it, if not even to oppose it. Later, however, even 

 the Christian Church felt itself forced to give the people some mental 

 nourishment in the form of natural historv, and under its influence, 

 perhaps actuallj^ composed by teachers of the Church, there appeared 

 a little book, the so-called PJiysiologus, which was meant to instruct 

 the people in regard to the animal Avorld. This remarkaljle work, 

 which has been preserved, must have had a very wide distribution 

 in the earlier Middle Ages, for it was translated into no fewer than 

 twelve languages, Greek, Armenian, Sj'riac, Arabic, Ethiopic, and so 

 on. The contents are very remarkable, and come from the most 

 diverse sources, that is, from the most difterent writers of antiquity, 

 from Herodotus, from the Bible, and so forth, but never from original 

 observation. The compilation does not really give descriptions of 

 animals or of their habits, but, of each of the forty-one animals which 

 the Physiologus recognizes, something remarkable is briefly related 

 in true lapidary style, sometimes a mere curiosity without further 

 import, or sometimes a sjnnbolical interpretation. Thus the book 

 says of the panther : ' he is gaily coloured ; after satiating himself he 



