BESTIARY. The mediaeval bestiary combined the character istics of a natural history text-book and Aesop's fables. It pro fessed to describe the nature and habits of living creatures and drew from them far-fetched moral and religious lessons. Its de scriptive portions were drawn largely from the Hexameron of Am brose, the Etymology of Isidore, and the works of Rabanus Maurus, which themselves were based on the writings of Aristotle, Pliny and Solinus. In its earliest form it was known as Physi ologus, that is, "the Naturalist," by which title it was denounced in a papal decree of c. Soo as written by heretics and falsely ascribed to St. Ambrose. It was also commonly attributed to St. Epiphanius (4th century). A physiologus seems to have been in existence as early as the 2nd century B.C., and the addition of Christian moralizations was natural in view of the many zoological metaphors found in the Bible :—"the lion of the house of Judah," "the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears," and so forth. About the beginning of the 12th century the physiologus, with its description of some 4o creatures, developed into the bestiary, which often de scribed as many as 200, divided into sections under beasts, birds, reptiles and fishes, with the addition, in a few mss., of trees and stones.
The bestiary was enormously popular in the middle ages, and mss. exist in most European languages, as well as in Armenian, Ethiopic and Syriac, most belonging to the period from the 12th to the 14th century, and particularly to the first half of the 13th. A large proportion of these. beginning with a fine loth century ms. in the Royal Library at Brussels, are illustrated, and these illustra tions greatly influenced contemporary art. A more or less com plete bestiary is painted on two piers of the nave of the church of St. Savin-le-Mont, and another is carved round the south doorway of Alne church in Yorkshire, while isolated illustrations, painted or carved, are innumerable. Heraldry derived from this source its unicorns, yales, leopards and fire-breathing panthers ; travellers, such as Jacques de Vitry, drew on the bestiaries for the wonders of the East, and preachers for their similes; while Richard de Four nival (c. 1250) wrote a Bestiaire d' Amour, in which he gave the symbolism a profane and amatory significance.
Regarded as natural history the bestiaries are puerile; the de scriptions of even the common domestic animals show very little power of observation; those of the rarer creatures show infinite credulity on the part of the writers and an inventive ingenuity on the part of the artists, whose renderings of such beasts as the crocodile are splendidly free from the fetters of realism. Sirens, dragons, the mantichora or man-headed lion, and the caladrius, a bird which, being brought to the bedside of a sick man, would in dicate his recovery or death by turning its head towards or away from him, were all accepted as being as real as rabbits. But they influenced art, literature and thought down to the days of Shake speare, and we still condemn the hypocrisy of the "crocodile's tears" when it devours a man, and approve the "licking into shape" by which the bear fashions her cubs, born without form.