73 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 







Here and there among men who were free from church control 

 we have work of a better sort. In the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 

 turies Abd Allatif made observations upon the natural history of 

 Egypt which showed a truly scientific spirit, and the Emperor 

 Frederick II attempted to promote a more fruitful study of Na- 

 ture ; but one of these men was abhorred as a Mussulman and the 

 other as an infidel. Far more in accordance with the spirit of the 

 time was the ecclesiastic Giraldus Cambrensis, whose book on the 

 topography of Ireland bestows much attention upon the animals 

 of the island, and rarely fails to make each contribute an appro- 

 priate moral. For example, he says that in Ireland " eagles live 

 for so many ages that they seem to contend with eternity itself ; 

 so also, the saints, having put off the old man and put on the new, 

 obtain the blessed fruit of everlasting life." Again, he tells us, 

 " Eagles often fly so high that their wings are scorched by the 

 sun ; so those who in the Holy Scriptures strive to unravel the 

 deep and hidden secrets of the heavenly mysteries, beyond what 

 is allowed, fall below as if the wings of the presumptuous imagi- 

 nations on which they are borne were scorched." 



In one of the great men of the following century began to ap- 

 pear a slight gleam of healthful criticism : Albert the Great, in 

 his work on the animals, dissents from the widespread belief that 

 certain birds spring from trees and are nourished by the sap, and 

 also from the theory that some are also generated in the sea from 

 decaying wood. 



But it required many generations for such skepticism to pro- 

 duce much effect, since we find among the illustrations in the edi- 

 tion of Mandeville published about the time of the Reformation 

 not only careful accounts but a pictured representation of birds 

 produced in the fruit of trees.* 



This general employment of natural science for biblical illus- 

 tration and the edification of the faithful went on after the Ref- 

 ormation. Luther frequently made this use of it, and his exam- 

 ple controlled his followers. In 1612 Wolfgang Franz, Professor 

 of Theology at Luther's university, gave to the world his sacred 

 history of animals, which went through many editions. It con- 

 tained a very ingenious classification, describing " natural drag- 

 lecture vi ; for an exhaustive discussion of the subject, see, Das Thierbuch des worman- 

 nischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc, herausgegeben von Reinisch, Leipsic, 1890 ; and, for 

 an Italian example, Goldstaub und Wendriner, Ein Tosco-Venezianischer Bestiarius, Halle, 

 1892, where is given, on pp. 369-371, a very pious but very comical tradition regarding the 

 beaver, hardly more than mentionable to ears polite. 



* For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition hi the Bohn Library, London, 1863, p. 30; 

 for Abd Allatif and Frederick II, see Hoefer, as above ; for Albertus Magnus, see the 

 De Animalibus, lib. xxiii ; for the illustrations in Mandeville, see the Strasburg edition, 

 1484. 



