beyond what is allowed, fall below, as if the wings of the presumptuous
imaginations on which they are borne were scorched."

In one of the great men of the following century appeared a 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
generated in the sea from decaying wood.

But it required many generations for such scepticism to produce much
effect, and we find among the illustrations in an edition of Mandeville
published just before the Reformation not only careful accounts but
pictured representations both of birds and of beasts produced in the
fruit of trees.(15)

(15) For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition in the Bohn Library,
London, 1863, p. 30; for the 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;
for the history of the myth of the tree which produces birds, see Max
Muller's lectures on the Science of Language, second series, lect. xii.

This general employment of natural science for pious purposes went on
after the Reformation. Luther frequently made this use of it, and his
example 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 contained a very ingenious
classification, describing "natural dragons," which have three rows of
teeth to each jaw, and he piously adds, "the principal dragon is the
Devil."

Near the end of the same century, Father Kircher, the great Jesuit
professor at Rome, holds back the sceptical current, insists upon the
orthodox view, and represents among the animals entering the ark sirens
and griffins.

Yet even among theologians we note here and there a sceptical spirit
in natural science. Early in the same seventeenth century Eugene
Roger published his Travels in Palestine. As regards the utterances
of Scripture he is soundly orthodox: he prefaces his work with a map
showing, among other important points referred to in biblical history,
the place where Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of
an ass, the cavern which Adam and Eve inhabited after their expulsion
from paradise, the spot where Balaam's ass spoke, the place where Jacob