Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/579

 standard of doctrine. The book remained essentially the same, albeit great liberties were taken with its details and outward form. There must have been many imperfect copies in circulation, from which people transcribed such sections as they found or chose, and afterwards completed their MS as occasion served Some even rearranged the contents according to the alphabet or to zoological affinity. So little was the collection considered as a literary work with a definite text that every one assumed a right to abridge or enlarge, to insert ideas of his own, or fresh scriptural quotations; nor were the scribes and translators by any means scrupulous about the names of natural objects, and even the passages from Holy Writ. Physiologus had been abandoned by scholars, and left to take its chance among the tales and traditions of the uneducated mass. Nevertheless, or rather for this very reason, its symbols found their way into the rising literature of the vulgar tongues, and helped to quicken the fancy of the artists employed upon church buildings and furniture.

The history of the Physiologus has become entwined from the beginning with that of the commentaries on the account of creation in Genesis. The principal production of this kind in our possession is the Hexaemeron of Basil, which contains several passages very like those of the Physiologus. For instance, in the seventh homily the fable of the nuptials of the viper and the conger-eel, known already to Aelian and Oppian, and proceeding from a curious misreading of Aristotle (Hist. An. v. 4, 540 b, Bekk), serves to point more than one moral. Notwithstanding the difference in theology, passages of this kind could not but be welcome to the admirers of the Alexandrian allegories. In fact a medley from both Basil and the Physiologus exists under the title of the Hexaemeron of Eustathius; some copies of the first bear as a title , and in a Milan MS. the “morals” of the Physiologus are ascribed to Basil. The Leyden Syriac is supplemented with literal extracts from the latter, and the whole is presented as his work. Other copies give the names of Gregory Theologus, Epiphanius, Chrysostom and Isidore.

As far as can be judged, the emblems of the original Physiologus were the following: (1) the lion (footprints rubbed out with tail, sleeps with eyes open; cubs receive life only three days after birth by their father's breath); (2) the sun-lizard (restores its sight by looking at the sun), (3) the charadrius (Deut. xiv. 16, presages recovery or death of patients); (4) the pelican (recalls its young to life by its own blood), (5) the owl (or nyktikorax, loves darkness and solitude); (6) the eagle (renews its youth by sunlight and bathing in a fountain); (7) the phoenix (revives from fire), (8) the hoopoe (redeems its parents from the ills of old age), (9) the wild ass (suffers no male besides itself), (10) the viper (born at the cost of both its parents' death); (11) the serpent (sheds its skin, puts aside its venom before drinking, is afraid of man in a state of nudity; hides its head and abandons the rest of its body), (12) the ant (orderly and laborious; prevents stored grain from germinating; distinguishes wheat from barley on the stalk); (13) the sirens and onocentaurs (Isa. xiii. 21, 22; compound creatures), (14) the hedgehog (pricks grapes upon its quills), (1;) the fox (catches birds by simulating death); (16) the panther (spotted skin; enmity to the dragon; sleeps for three days after meals, allures its prey by sweet odour); (17) the sea-tortoise (or aspidochelone, mistaken by sailors for an island); (18) the partridge (hatches eggs of other birds); (19) the vulture (assisted in birth by a stone with loose kernel); (20) the ant-lion (able neither to take the one food nor to digest the other); (21) the weasel (conceives by the mouth and brings forth by the ear), (22) the unicorn (caught only by a virgin); (23) the beaver (gives up its testes when pursued), (24) the hyaena (a hermaphrodite), (25) the otter (enhydris, enters the crocodile's mouth to kill it), (26) the ichneumon (covers itself with mud to kill the dragon, another version of No 25), (27) the crow (takes but one consort in its life), (28) the turtle-dove (same nature as No. 27), (29) the frog (either living on land and killed by rain, or in the water without ever seeing the sun); (30) the stag (destroys its enemy the serpent); (31) the salamander (quenches fire); (32) the diamond (powerful against all danger); (33) the swallow (brings forth but once; misreading of Aristotle, Hist. An. v. 13); (34) the tree called peridexion (protects pigeons from the serpent by its shadow); (35) the pigeons (of several colours led by one of them, which is of a purple or golden colour); (36) the antelope (or hydrippus; caught by its horns in the thicket): (37) the fire flints (of two sexes, combine to produce fire); (38) the magnet (adheres to iron); (39) the saw-fish (sails in company with ships); (40) the ibis (fishes only along the shore); (41) the ibex (descries a hunter from afar); (42) the diamond again (read “carbuncle”; found only by night); (43) the elephant (conceives after partaking of mandrake; brings forth in the water; the young protected from the serpent by the father; when fallen is lifted up only by a certain small individual of its own kind); (44) the agate (employed in pearl-fishing); (45) the wild ass and ape (mark the equinox); (46) the Indian stone (relieves patients of the dropsy); (47) the heron (touches no dead body, and keeps to one dwelling place); (48) the sycamore (or wild fig; grubs living inside the fruit and coming out); (49) the ostrich (devours all sorts of things; forgetful of its own eggs). Besides these, or part of them, certain copies contain sections of unknown origin about the bee, the stork, the tiger. the woodpecker, the spider and the wild boar.

The Greek text of the Physiologus exists only in late MSS., and has to be corrected from the translations. In Syriac we have a full copy in a 12th-century Leyden MS.. published in J. P. N. Land’s Anecdota Syriaca; thirty-two chapters with the “morals” left out in a very late Vatican copy, published by Tychsen; and about the same number in a late MS. of the British Museum (Add. 25878). In Armenian Pitra gave some thirty-two chapters from a Paris MS. (13th century) The Aethiopic exists both in London and Paris, and was printed at Leipzig by Dr Hommel in 1877. In Arabic we have fragments at Paris, of which Renan translated a specimen for the Spicilegium solesmense, and another version of thirty-seven chapters at Leiden, probably the work of a monk at Jerusalem, which Land translated and printed with the Syriac. The Latin MSS of Bern are, after the Vatican glossary of Ansileubus, the oldest of which we know; there are others in several libraries, and printed editions by Mai, Heider and Cahier. Besides these, a few fragments of an old abridgment occur in Vallarsi's edition of Jerome's works (vol xi. col 218). A metrical Physiologus of but twelve chapters is the work of Theobaldus, probably abbot of Monte Cassino ( 1022–1035). From this was imitated the Old-English fragment printed by Th. Wright, and afterwards by Maetzner; also the Old-French Sensuyl le bestiaire d’amours. The prose Physiologus was done into Old High German before 1000, and afterwards into rhyme in the same idiom; since Von der Hagen (1824) its various forms have found careful editors among the leading Germanists The Icelandic, in a Copenhagen MS of the 13th century, was printed by Professor Th. Mobius in his Analecta norroena (2nd ed., 1877); at the same time he gave it in German in Dr Hommel’s Aethiopic publication Some Anglo-Saxon metrical fragments are to be found in Grein’s Bibliothek, vol. i. The Provençal (c. 1250), published in Bartsch's Chrestomathie provençale, omits the “morals,” but is remarkable for its peculiarities of form. Before this there had been translations into French dialects, as by Philippe de Thaun (1121), by Guillaume, “clerc de Normandie,” also, about the same period, by Pierre, a clergyman of Picardy. All the Old-French materials have not yet been thoroughly examined, and it is far from improbable that some versions of the book either remain to be detected or are now lost past recovery. A full account of the history of the Physiologus should also embrace the subjects taken from it in the productions of Christian art, the parodies suggested by the original work, e.g. the Bestiaire d’amour by Richard de Fournival, and finally the traces left by it upon the encyclopaedical and literary work of the later middle ages.

Nearly all the information now obtainable is to be found in the following works and such as are there quoted S Epiphanius ad physiologum, ed. Ponce de Leon (with woodcuts) (Rome, 1587); another edition, with copper-plates (Antwerp, 1588); S. Eustathii in hexahemeron commentarius, ed Leo Allatius (Lyons, 1629; cf. H. van Herwerden, Exercitt Critt, pp. 180–182, Hague, 1862); Physiologus syrus, ed. O. G. Tychsen (Rostock, 1795), Classici auctores, ed Mai, vii. 585–596 (Rome, 1835); G. Heider, in ''Archiv für Kunde österreich. Geschichtsquellen'' ii. 545 seq. (Vienna, 1850); Cahier and Martin, Mélanges d’archéologie, &c. ii. 85 seq. (Paris, 1851), iii. 203 seq (1853), iv. 55 seq. (1856), Cahier, Nouveaux mélanges (1874), p. 106 seq; J. B. Pitra, Spicilegium solesmense iii. xlvii seq, 338 seq, 416, 535 (Paris, 1855); Maetzner, Altengl Sprachproben (Berlin, 1867), Vol 1 pt. i. p. 55 seq; J Victor Carus, ''Gesch. der Zoologie (Munich, 1872), p. 109 seq; J. P. N. Land, Anecdota syriaca'' (Leiden, 1874), iv. 31 seq., 115 seq., and in ''Verslagen en Mededeelingen der kon. Akad. van Wetenschappen'', 2nd series, vol. iv. (Amsterdam, 1874); Möbius and Hommel in their