ess giveth birth to cubs which
remain three days without life. Then cometh the lion, breatheth upon
them, and bringeth them to life.... Thus it is that Jesus Christ
during three days was deprived of life, but God the Father raised him
gloriously."

Pious use was constantly made of this science, especially by monkish
preachers. The phoenix rising from his ashes proves the doctrine of the
resurrection; the structure and mischief of monkeys proves the existence
of demons; the fact that certain monkeys have no tails proves that Satan
has been shorn of his glory; the weasel, which "constantly changes its
place, is a type of the man estranged from the word of God, who findeth
no rest."

The moral treatises of the time often took the form of works on natural
history, in order the more fully to exploit these religious teachings of
Nature. Thus from the book On Bees, the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpre,
we learn that "wasps persecute bees and make war on them out of natural
hatred"; and these, he tells us, typify the demons who dwell in the
air and with lightning and tempest assail and vex mankind--whereupon he
fills a long chapter with anecdotes of such demonic warfare on mortals.
In like manner his fellow-Dominican, the inquisitor Nider, in his book
The Ant Hill, teaches us that the ants in Ethiopia, which are said to
have horns and to grow so large as to look like dogs, are emblems of
atrocious heretics, like Wyclif and the Hussites, who bark and bite
against the truth; while the ants of India, which dig up gold out of
the sand with their feet and hoard it, though they make no use of it,
symbolize the fruitless toil with which the heretics dig out the gold of
Holy Scripture and hoard it in their books to no purpose.

This pious spirit not only pervaded science; it bloomed out in art, and
especially in the cathedrals. In the gargoyles overhanging the walls, in
the grotesques clambering about the towers or perched upon pinnacles, in
the dragons prowling under archways or lurking in bosses of foliage, in
the apocalyptic beasts carved upon the stalls of the choir, stained into
the windows, wrought into the tapestries, illuminated in the letters
and borders of psalters and missals, these marvels of creation suggested
everywhere morals from the Physiologus, the Bestiaries, and the
Exempla.(14)

(14) For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de Xivrey,
Traditions Teratologiques; also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiar