Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 11.pdf/53

 36

frequently called to answer for their crimes. cruel, that Racine caricatured them in " Les The judiciary of the Cistercian abbey of Plaideurs," where a dog is tried for stealing Daudin solemnly Beaupre, in 1499, sent a bull to the gallows and eating a capon. takes his seat as judge, and declares his for having " killed with furiosity a lad four teen or fifteen years of age; " and in 1389 determination to " close his eyes to bribes the Carthusians at Dijon caused a horse to and his -ears to brigue." Petit Jean prose be condemned to death for homicide. The cutes the case, and L'Intime appears for magistrates of Bale, in 1474, sentenced a the defense. Both address the court in cock to be burned at the stake for the high-flown rhetoric and display rare erudi heinous and unnatural crime of laying an tion in quoting authorities. The accused is egg. The c£t1f eoquatri was supposed to condemned to the galleys. Thereupon the be the product of a very old cock and to counsel for the defendant brings in the pup pies, _pauvres enfants qu'on vent rendre orfurnish the most active and effective ingre phelins] , and appeals to the compassion and dient of witch ointment. When hatched by a serpent or by the sun, it brought forth a clemency of the judge. Daudin's feelings cockatrice, which would hide in the roof of are touched; as a public officer, too, he is a house, and, with its baneful breath and moved by the economical consideration that if the children are deprived of their father, "death-darting eye," destroy all the in mates. Naturalists believed in this fable as they must be kept in the foundling hospital late as the eighteenth century; and in 1710 at the expense of the state. To the con the French savant Lapeyrouie read a paper temporaries of Racine a scene like this had before the Academie des Sciences to prove a significance which we fail to appreciate. that the eggs attributed to cocks owe their To us it is simply farcical and not very fun ny, to them it was a mirror, reflecting a peculiar form to a disease of the hen. Ani characteristic feature of the time and ridicul mals, also, bore their full part of the perse cution during the witcheraft delusion. Pigs ing a grave judiciary abuse, as Cervantes suffered most in this respect, and were had already represented in Don Quixote the assumed to be peculiarly attractive to devils, j reduetio ad absurdum of chivalry. and therefore particularly liable to diabolical Lex talionis is the oldest kind of law and possession, as is evident from the legion that the most deeply rooted in human nature. went out of the tomb-haunting man, and To the primitive man and the savage, tit for were permitted, at their own request, to tat is an ethical axiom. No principle is enter into the Gadarene herd of swine. held more firmly or acted upon more uni Indeed, the greatest theological authority of versally than that of literal equivalents, the the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, main iron rule of doing unto others the wrongs tained that beasts are but embodiments of which others have done unto you. Hebrew evil spirits. Chassenee quotes this opinion, legislation demanded " Life for life, eye for and adds that in excommunicating animals eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for the anathema " is aimed inferentially at the foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, devil, who uses irrational creatures to our stripe for stripe." In the covenant with detriment." Still more recently, a French Noah it was declared that human blood Jesuit, Pere Bougeant, set forth the same should be required " at the hand of man" view in a philosophical treatise. and " at the hand of every beast"; and it was subsequently enacted that " if an ox It was during the latter half of the seven gore a man or woman that they die, then teenth century, when, as we have seen, crimi nal prosecutions of animals were especially the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh frequent and the penalties inflicted extremely shall not be eaten." To eat a creature