Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/14

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the mandrake groans when pulled from the ground; the pelican in her piety feeds her brood by blood plucked from her breast; the barnacle la half herb, half animal; the hyena converses with shepherds; the crocodile weeps over his victims; the barometz is a lamb that is also partly a vegetable; the fleeing lion erases his tracks with the end of his tail; the father of the ant-lion "hath a shape like a lion, his mother that of an ant; the father liveth on flesh and the mother on herbs; his fore-part is like that of a lion and his hind-part like that of an ant; being thus composed he is neither able to eat flesh like his father, or herbs like his mother, and so he perisheth."

These are a few extracts from the story books that delighted Europe for centuries.

The earth was generally believed to be flat, though the Greeks of Alexandria knew better. The 'waters above the firmament' were navigable; and there was a story of an anchor dropped to earth from a ship sailing in this second ocean. There were races of men with one eye, others with one leg, others whose enormous feet served as umbrellas to keep away the rays of the torrid sun. Shakespeare's 'men whose heads do lie between their shoulders' date from these legends. Fauns, fairies, lamiæ, sylphs, vampires and the like were dreaded. Everything was received with acquiescent wonder, and without criticism, whether it were a miracle done by the relic of a saint, or the extravagant tale of a traveler. The age of faith deserves its name in so far as it was characteristically an age devoid of criticism.

An Arabic compilation of the tenth century, Adja ih al-Hind—the marvels of India—is composed of a hundred and twenty-four paragraphs, each relating to some wonder recounted to the author by persons whom he names. The work is entirely serious and the narrators were famous seamen, merchants and travelers who were familiar with the Indian Ocean, the Malay archipelago, the China seas and Ceylon. These stories taken as a whole exhibit the extensive commerce carried on, even at that day, between the nearer and the farther east, and speak eloquently for the skill and courage of those early navigators who traversed almost unknown seas with nothing but the stars to guide them. Many of the marvels of the Arabian Nights are to be found here—the roc, the valley of diamonds guarded by serpents, the shipmen who mistake the back of a sleeping turtle of gigantic size for an island, and the like. The legend of the Island of Women, under the star Canopus, where the sea slopes downward, and where only women dwell, is gravely given without even the phrase 'But Allah alone knows if this be true,' by which a good Muslim shows his doubts. Of the existence of the gigantic bird, the roc, the author says 'This is a fact well known to shipmen, and I have never known any one to doubt it. 'The crocodiles of the Harbor of Serira do not bite men, he says, because they were enchanted by a magician who had the power to make them harmless and harmful at will. The prudent king of the country caused