omb, as in a
field, animals unseen by reason of their smallness and without form;
these again are separated and matured within; they are then finally
brought out into the light, and thus the generation of animals is
completed.

Thus were created women and the female sex in general. But the race of
birds was created out of innocent light-minded men, who, although their
minds were directed toward heaven, imagined, in their simplicity, that
the clearest demonstration of the things above was to be obtained by
sight; these were remodelled and transformed into birds, and they grew
feathers instead of hair. The race of wild pedestrian animals, again,
came from those who had no philosophy in any of their thoughts, and
never considered at all about the nature of the heavens, because they
had ceased to use the courses of the head, but followed the guidance of
those parts of the soul which are in the breast. In consequence of these
habits of theirs they had their front-legs and their heads resting upon
the earth to which they were drawn by natural affinity; and the crowns
of their heads were elongated and of all sorts of shapes, into which the
courses of the soul were crushed by reason of disuse. And this was the
reason why they were created quadrupeds and polypods: God gave the more
senseless of them the more support that they might be more attracted to
the earth. And the most foolish of them, who trail their bodies entirely
upon the ground and have no longer any need of feet, he made without
feet to crawl upon the earth. The fourth class were the inhabitants
of the water: these were made out of the most entirely senseless and
ignorant of all, whom the transformers did not think any longer worthy
of pure respiration, because they possessed a soul which was made impure
by all sorts of transgression; and instead of the subtle and pure medium
of air, they gave them the deep and muddy sea to be their element of
respiration; and hence arose the race of fishes and oysters, and other
aquatic animals, which have received the most remote habitations as a
punishment of their outlandish ignorance. These are the laws by which
animals pass into one another, now, as ever, changing as they lose or
gain wisdom and folly.

We may now say that our discourse about the nature of the universe has
an end. The world has received animals, mortal and immortal, and is
fulfilled with them, and has become a visible animal containing the
visible--the sensi