12 THE EVOLUTION THEORY 



sleeps three days, and awakes roaring, giving forth such an agreeable 

 odour that all animals come to him.' Of the pelican the well-known 

 legend is related, that it tears open its own breast to feed its young 

 with its blood, thus standing as a symbol of mother-love. Fabulous 

 creatures, too, appear in these pages. Of the Phoenix, that bird 

 whose plumage glitters with gold and precious stones, which was 

 known even to Herodotus, and which has survived through Eastern 

 fairy-tales on to the time of our own romanticists (Tieck), we read : 'it 

 lives a thousand years, because it has not eaten of the tree of know- 

 ledge ' ; then ' it sets fire to itself and arises anew from its own ashes,' 

 a symbol of nature's infinite power of renewing its youth. 



But while among the peoples of Europe all the science of the 

 ancients was lost, except a few barely recognizable fragments, the old 

 lore was preserved, both as regards organic nature and other orders 

 of facts, among the Arabs, through whom so many treasures of 

 antiquity have eventually been handed down to us, coming in the 

 track of the Arabian conquests across North Africa and Spain to the 

 nations of Europe. 



It was in this way, too, that the writings of Aristotle again 

 found recognition, after having been translated into Latin at Palermo 

 at the order of that enthusiast for Science and Art, the Hohen- 

 staufen Emperor, Frederick the Second. Our Emperor presented 

 one copy of Aristotle's writings to the University of Bologna, and 

 thus the wisdom of the ancient Greeks again became the common 

 property of European culture. From the thirteenth century to the 

 eighteenth, the study of natural science was limited to repeating and 

 extending the work of Aristotle. Nothing new, depending upon 

 personal observation, was added, and it does not even seem to have 

 occurred to any one to subject the statements of the Stagirite to any 

 test, even when they concerned the most familiar objects. No one 

 noticed the error which ascribed to the fly eight legs instead of six ; 

 there was in fact as yet no investigation, and all knowledge of 

 natural history was purely scholastic, and gave absolute credence 

 to the authority of the ancients. 



A revulsion, however, occurred in the century of the Reforma- 

 tion, with the breaking down of the blind belief in authority which 

 had till then prevailed in all provinces of human knowledge and 

 thought. After a long and severe struggle, dry scholasticism was 

 finally overcome, and natural science, with the rest, turned from a 

 mere reliance on books to original thinking and personal observa- 

 tion. Thenceforward interpretations of natural processes were sought 

 for no longer in the writings of the ancients, but in Nature herself. 



