those of most men of
his age; and, as in the case of our own Friar Bacon, his superior
attainments were popularly attributed to magical arts. Nature, it need
hardly be remarked, is the only school of magic, and men of science are
the true magicians.

_Unheard-of Monsters._

The marvellous creatures which are described by Pliny, and by our own
old English writers, Sir John Mandeville and Geoffrey of Monmouth, are
common-place in comparison with some of those mentioned in the Talmud.
Even the monstrous _roc_ of the _Arabian Nights_ must have been a mere
tom-tit compared with the bird which Rabbi bar Chama says he once saw.
It was so tall that its head reached the sky, while its feet rested on
the bottom of the ocean; and he affords us some slight notion of the
depth of the sea by informing us that a carpenter's axe, which had
accidentally fallen in, had not reached the bottom in seven years. The
same Rabbi saw "a frog as large as a village containing sixty houses."
Huge as this frog was, the snake that swallowed it must have been the
very identical serpent of Scandinavian mythology, which encircled the
earth; yet a crow gobbled up this serpent, and then flew to the top of a
cedar, which was as broad as sixteen waggons placed side by
side.--Sailors' "yarns," as they are spun to marvel-loving old ladies in
our jest-books, are as nothing to the rabbinical accounts of "strange
fish," some with eyes like the moon, others horned, and 300 miles in
length. Not less wonderful are some four-footed creatures. The effigy of
the unicorn, familiar to every schoolboy, on the royal arms of Great
Britain, affords no adequate idea of the actual dimensions of that
remarkable animal. Since a unicorn one day old is as large as Mount
Tabor, it may readily be supposed that Noah could not possibly have got
a full-grown one into the ark; he therefore secured it by its horn to
the side, and thus the creature was saved alive. (The Talmudist had
forgot that the animals saved from the Flood were in pairs.)[80] The
celebrated Og, king of Bashan, it seems, was one of the antediluvians,
and was saved by riding on the back of the unicorn. The dwellers in
Brobdignag were pigmies compared with the renowned King Og, since his
footsteps were forty miles apart, and Abraham's ivory bed was made of
one of his teeth. Moses, the Rabbis tell us, was ten cubits high[81] and
his walking-stick ten cubits more, with the top of which, after jumping
ten cubits from