SCIENCE IN EARLY ENGLAND. 735 



"Cancer signifies that it can not go straight by land nor by sea, and 

 when God came on the earth to conquer our souls He went much from 

 side to side ; He dared not come forwards, He feared much to Pagans 

 and the Jews, because they were to kill Him and make Him a martyr." 

 "The fifth sign is placed in July, which is called Lion, because he is very 

 great before and his legs are feeble behind ; so the sun in the begin- 

 ning takes all his force; he is all boiling, very hot and burning; when he 

 is come to the middle he has hardly more strength than the lion who 

 has small flanks." 



We must now leave this treatise and proceed with the Bestiary. 

 This particular one was written for the instruction of Adelaide of Lou- 

 vain, Queen of Henry I, to whom she was married in 1121 ; but works 

 on natural history, compiled from Greek and Roman writers, were com- 

 mon under the name of Physiologus or Bestiary, from the tenth or 

 eleventh century onwards; copies being known in Old High German, 

 Icelandic, Provencal, Arabic, Syriac, etc., not to mention Latin and 

 French. Many strange qualities are assigned to real beasts in this com- 

 pilation, and stranger still to the fabulous ones "Oetus is a very great 

 beast; it lives always in the sea; it takes to sand of the sea, spreads it 

 on its back, raises itself up, and will be in tranquillity. The seafarer 

 comes, thinks that it is an island, and goes to arrive there to prepare 

 his meal. The whale feels the fire and the ship and the people, then 

 he will plunge if he can and drown them. This cetus is the devil, 

 the sea is the world, and the sands are the riches of the world; the 

 soul the steersman, and the body the ship which he ought to keep, 

 and the fire is love, because man loveth his gold, his gold and his 

 silver. When he perceives that and he shall be the more sure, then he 

 will drown him. And this cetus, says the writing, has such a nature 

 that when he wants to eat, he begins to gape, and the gaping of his 

 mouth sends forth a smell so sweet and so good, that the little fish, 

 who like the smell, will enter his mouth, and then he will kill them, 

 then he will swallow them, and similarly the devil will strangle the 

 people who shall love him so much that they will enter into his mouth." 

 Hardly a single one of these descriptions is allowed to pass without a 

 moral, the constant repetition of which becomes wearisome, not to say 

 exasperating, to a modern reader, as it probably did to the ancient one. 

 The salamander is of course found here. "If it come by chance where 

 there shall be burning fire, it will immediately extinguish it; the beast 

 is so cold and also of such a quality, fire will not be able to go where 

 it shall enter." Also the wild ass which brays twelve times both by 

 night and day at the equinox; the beaver with a curious instinct, and 

 the serra with the head of a lion and tail of a fish, which, when it sees 

 a ship, rises up and keeps the wind off it. It is somewhat startling to 

 read that "the turtle is a bird, simple, chaste, and fair, and loves its 

 mate so much that never during its life will it have another. Always 

 afterwards it will lament him; nor will it be any more on the branch." 

 One's appreciation of what appears at first sight an amazing blunder 



