, or worse than a bad
one, and he proceeds to compare women to various animals. He is also
evidently very serious over the subject, and regards it as no joke at
all. Perhaps there was also something to be said on the other side, for
he remarks that a gadding wife cannot be cured, even if you "knock out
her teeth with a stone." He likens them to pigs and polecats, horses
and apes; and only praises the descendant of the bee. In a passage
undoubtedly of early date, and attributed to Xenophanes, the founder of
the Eleatic school of philosophy, (540-500) the writer enumerates the
various ways, in which other animals are superior to man. "If by the
will of God there were an equality and community in life, so that the
herald of the Olympian games should not only call men to the contest,
but also bid all animals to come, no man would carry off a prize; for
in the long race the horse would be the best; the hare would win the
short race; the deer would be best in the double race. No man's
fleetness would count for anything, and no one since Hercules would seem
to have been stronger than the elephant or lion; the bull would carry
off the crown in striking, and the ass in kicking, and history would
record that an ass conquered men in wrestling and boxing."

But the light in which the lower animals were regarded, produced other
fanciful combinations. Not only were men given the attributes of
animals, but animals were endowed with the gifts peculiar to man. All
things were then possible. Standing as he seemed in the centre of a
plain of indefinite or interminable extent, how could any man limit the
productions or vagaries of Nature, even if he possessed far more than
the narrow experience of those days? Moreover, the boundary lines were
vague between the natural and supernatural, and the latter was supposed
to be constantly interposing in the ordinary affairs of life. Among
other beliefs then prevalent, was one in the existence of a kind of half
nature, such as that in Centaurs, dragons, and griffins. In the Assyrian
cuneiform inscriptions lately deciphered, we read, of one Heabani, a
semi-bovine hermit, supposed to have lived 2,200 B.C. Thus the
accounts in Scripture of the serpent accosting Eve, and of Balaam
arguing with his ass, would not have seemed so remarkable then as they
do to us. In an Egyptian novel--the oldest extant, cir. 1,400
B.C.--a cow tells Bata that his elder brother is standing
before him with his dagger ready to