Mediæval Natural History

Southland Times, Issue 19381, 3 September 1904, Page 2 (Supplement)

Mediæval Natural History

SUPERSTITIONS ABOUT ANIMALS. TH'E TWO-SEIXED UARE : r ITIE LOPSIDED BADGER; THE PORCUPINE ; TIDE GREAT WHALE, ETC., ETC. (By T. D, Pea ree, M.A.) (Concluded.) Ignorance about animals belonging to distant countries is pardonable. Of such a common animal as the hare it was believed, three centuries ago that it changed its sex yearly. Lyly says " Hares we cannot be, because they are male one year and the next female." Fletcher in The Gentle Shepherd says the same thing. " Hares that yearly sexes change." Even the learned Sir Thomas Browne half admits the probability of such a thing. Again of the Badger, there was a "curious belief, that its legs were shorter on one side than on the other. " Why "do you asik ? The explanation is perfectly simple. The legs were shorter on one side so that the animal could run the more easily on a hillside. Topsell's description is : — " His back is broad, his legs some say longer on the right side than on the left, and therefore lie runneth best when he getteth to the side of a hill or cartroad way." The author of " Britannia's Pastorals " is evidently a firm believer in this notion : — " And as that beast hath legs, which shepherds fear, Yclept a badger, which our lambs doth tear, One -long, the other short, that when he runs Upon the plain, he halts ; but when he wons On craggy rocks, or steepy hills, wo see None runs more swift, nor easier than he." The hedgehog, according to Lyiy, frequented hedges because " lie himself is so full of prickles." A country superstition, current till comparatively recently, was that the hedgehog sucked the cows' teats, greatly to the annoyance of the milkmaids. A creature similar to the hedgehog iin being armed with sharp quills is the porcupine or porpentine. Fron the fact that the quills are sometimes found sticking in other ani malsi' flesh, and from tho fact that at the moulting stage they more readily cast them off, arose the notion that the animal could at will discharge its quills. In Churchill's " Voyages' there is this description of a voyage to the East Indies :— " About Batavia and in the woods of Java art abundance of iron pigs or'porcupines. When they are at rest they lay their pens or" pegs close to thc body, but if they are .vexed they can, by contracting themselves, cast them forth with such strength that they kill man or beast." Ifc doejj^ot seem to have occurred to the wntei that constant pursuit and consequent defence would have ultimately strip ped. the animal of all its quills. How are we to explain the BELIEF IN THjESE ABSURD STORIES, even oh the part of educated and learned men*-? W© must put it down to the credulity and uncriticalness ol the age. As I said at the beginning of my lecture, the horizon of knowledge was widening in every direction. The discovery of new lands, the stories of the early navigators, the dissemination of books by thc new process of printing, with its accompanying revival in the interest; oi books, suddenly made men feverish to read and to know. So many new aspects of life were opened up that the imagination, constantly called upon to picture these, readily went further and in its riotous enjoyment swallowed the incredible with the credible, unable to' discriminate between the two- Take Oians Magnus, of thc sixteenth century, the author of a compendious history of the northern nations, evidently a well-read man, occupying an exalted position in the church, being the metropolitan bishop of Sweden. You would expect a Swede to know something of the animals of his own country. Here s what he says, among other things, of bears, -ermines and whales. Describing tbe bear, he writes : — " For the most part she useth to bring forth five whelps not much greater than mice, without any shape.. Their flesh is white, but they have not eyes nor hair ; yet the nails appear. By degrees the damsi lick these whelps into form." When ho says "licks these whelps into form," he is merely following an absurd storyY handed down from antiquity, that a bear's cubs were moulded into form by the mother's tongue. Shakespeare refers to this belief when ho says : — " Like to a chaos, or ah unlick'd bear- whelp, That carries no impresssion like the dam." Of the Norwegian ermine our Archbishop gives a strange ac-> count : — " These fsniall beasts every three years grow to have their skins very long, * because they eat so much. This happens in all the districts of Norway, namely, that small beasts with four feet, that they call Temmar (Norwegian rat), with a skin diverse coloured, fall out of the air in tempests and sudden showers. No man knows whence. they come, whether from the remoter islands, and are brought liither by the.; wind, or else they breed" of secalent matter in the jlouds ; yet this is proved, that sq soon as they fall down, there is found green grass in their bellies not /et digested. These, like locusts, ailing in great swarms, destroy all jreen things. At the set time they jither die in heaps, with a contagion if the earth, or they are devoured by_ jeasts, co-nltnonly called lekat or hernelin. and these ermines grow fat .hereby, and their skins grow long:r, And these skins are sold by tens

and are carried forth by shipping in- j to far distant countries." LASTLY OF THE WHALE. Here you would expect reliable in- j formation from the northerner from the familiarity of his countrymen with the animal. Hero is his instructive account : — " There are many kinds of whales.- Some are hairy, and of 4 acres in bigness. Tlie acre is 240ft.' long, and 120ft. broad. Some are smooth-skinned, and theso are smaller, and are taken in the west and northern sea. Some have their jaws long and full of teeth, and the teeth are 6 or 8 or 12 feet long, but their two dog teeth or tusks are longer than the rest, underneath like a horn, like the teeth of boars or elephants This kind of whale hath a fit mouth, to eat ; and his eyes arc so large that lo men may sit in the room of each of them. His horns are 6or 7 feet long, and he hath 250 upon each eye, as hard as horn, that ho enn stir stiff or gentle, either, before or behind. These grow together to defend his eyes in tempestuous weather, or when any other beast that i.s hi.s enemy sots upon him. Nor is it a wonder that he hath so many horns, though they be very troublesome to him, when ns between his eyes, the space of his forehead is 1"> or 20 feet." f INFLUENCE OF ANIMALS UPON , MAN'S SENSES.

It has been said, whether rightly or wrongly, that long and constant association with animals ultimately produces its effect upon the human countenance. Thus, for example, constant association with horses produces a hard, long face, hence the term, horse-faced ; constant association with dogs produces the dogfaced man, the man keeping bulldogs as pets acquiring gradually the savage leer of that animal. Well, it. may not have occurred to some of you when making yourselves snug for the night urider a rug, say a rug of wolves' skins, that you run a certain risk of acquiring a .wolfish appetite. I assure you the learned Archbishop of Sweden, Oians Magnus, of the [sixteenth century, thought it so im- | portant a matter that he ought not ito omit warning his reader of it. | For. at the end of his account of the wolverine or glutton, he adds :—

" And I do not think fit to overpass, t hat when men sleep under these skins, thay have dreams that agree with the nature of that creature, and thus) acquire an insatiable stomach. '-'- The same writer has also a curiosity in the way in which animals influence men's feelings, in his description of the seal. After accurately describing the seals' bodies and mode of life, he concludes with these words : — " No creature sleeps more profoundly ; the fm»si that servo them to swim in the sea, serve for legs on land, an'd they go hobbling up and down as lame people do. Their skins though taken from their bodies, have always a sense of the seas ; the right lin hath a soporiferbus quality, to make one sleep, if it be put under one's head. They that fear thunder, think those tabernacles best to live in that are made of sealskins, because only this creature in the sea. as an eagle in the air, is safe and secure from the stroke of thunder." Thus you see there is reason for everything, even for the predilection ladies have for sealskin coats, as safeguards against the evil effects of thunder, and as inducers of a sleepy, restful feeling. Speaking of the DENIZENS |0F THE SEA.

| One is reminded that even yet. we have our mariners' tales of wonderful creatures. Have not we the seaserpent with us ? Have we not had actual measurements taken of it ? Does not Mr Bullen believe in it still? Then why should we discredit our worthy Archbishop when he thu- describes it : — " They who in works of navigation, on. the coast of Norway, employ themselves ill fishing or merchandise, do all agree in this strange story, that there i.s a serpent there which is of a vast magnitude, namely 200 feet long, and moreover 20 feet thick. It is wont to live in rocks and caves towards thc sea-coast about Barge ; which will go alone from his holes in a clear night, in summer, and devour calves, lambs, and hogs, or else he goes into the se a to feed on polypus, locusts, and all sorts of sea-crabs. He hnth commonly hair hanging from his neck a cubit long, and sharp scales, and is black, and he hath flaming shining eyes. This snake disr-uiets the skippers, and he puts up his head on high like a pillar, and catcheth away men, and he devours them." Many more extracts could be given from the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to indicate what was the natural history of our forefathers. With our enlightenment it is difficult to believe that people ever put their faith in .such accounts. Ignorance of small organism is pardonable. It is