when he
made the Duke compare adversity to the toad with a magic jewel in its
head commonly known as "a toad-stone," although that "common
knowledge" was really not knowledge at all, but--like an enormous mass
of the accepted current statements in those times, about animals,
plants and stones--was an absolutely baseless invention. Such baseless
beliefs were due to the perfectly innocent but reckless habit of
mankind, throughout long ages, of exaggerating and building up
marvellous narrations on the one hand, and on the other hand of
believing without any sufficient inquiry, and with delight and
enthusiasm, such marvellous narrations set down by others. Each writer
or "gossip" concerning the wonders of unexplored nature, consciously
or unconsciously, added a little to the story as received by him, and
so the authoritative statements as to marvels grew more and more
astonishing and interesting.

It was not until the time of Shakespeare himself that another spirit
began to assert itself--namely, that of asking whether a prevalent
belief or tradition is actually a true statement of fact. Men
proceeded to test the belief by an examination of the thing in
question, and not by merely adducing the assertions of "the learned
so-and-so," or of "the ingenious Mr. Dash." This spirit of inquiry
actually existed in a fairly active state among the more cultivated of
the ancient Greeks. Aristotle (who flourished about 350 B.C.), though
he could not free himself altogether from the primitive tendency to
accept the marvellous as true because it is marvellous and without
regard to its probability--in fact because of its improbability--yet
on the whole showed a determination to investigate, and to see things
for himself, and left in his writings an immense series of first-rate
original observations. He had far more of the modern scientific spirit
than had the innumerable credulous writers of Western Europe who lived
fifteen hundred to two thousand years after him. Even that delightful
person Herodotus, who preceded Aristotle by a hundred years,
occasionally took the trouble to inquire into some of the wonders he
heard of on his travels, and is careful to say now and then that he
does not believe what he heard. But the mediaeval-makers of
"bestiaries," herbals, and treatises on stones, which were collections
of every possible fancy and "old-wife's tale," about animals, plants,
and minerals, mixed up with Greek and Arabic legends and the
m