in his City of God, and Isidore uses no less than two hundred extracts in his Etymologies. The pagan's work was both a symptom and a cause of the intellectual decline in the Middle Ages. Other men did as he did, or accepted the results of his labors as sparing them its pains. What he did, and what Europe did after the breakdown of the old order of things, was to forget ancient wisdom and hold fast to ancient wonder. Solinus was spiritual father of the Christian fabulists, mentor of the Christian pilgrims.

What Pliny wrote, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, Solinus copies with mouth agape. The world is become a playhouse, a curio hall, a province of faerie. One learns that, like man, the quail suffers from the falling sickness and that the cranes of Thrace travel southward in ballast, stuffing their craws with sand and pebbles. In the Mediterranean islands there is a "sardonic" plant, on eating which one grins horribly and dies of lockjaw. In Germany are the Hercynian birds whose feathers give light in the dark. Here also is a mule-like pastoral beast with so long an upper lip that he "cannot feed except walking backward." In Africa are jovial apes which rejoice in the new of the moon and lament in its wane, and sphinxes and satyrs "easily taught to forget their wildness, very sweet faced, and full of toying continually." There are no snakes in Irelandand no sense of right and wrong.

The Physiologus, an Alexandrian compilation, companions the Collecteanea, but introduces a moralizing note and thereby ushers a rabble of real and fabulous animals into the symbolism of ecclesiastical architecture. Isidore of Seville is a desiccated Solinus, dried out by theology and the specialized pursuits of the grammarian. He wrote at the opening of the seventh century. His Etymologies has already been cited as that irreducible minimum of knowledge to which the epitomizing habit of Roman encyclopædists tended always. It shows also the Roman dependence on authority as a substitute for research, and the Roman worship of words. Easy it was for early Christian writers to take up the tradition of the encyclopædists, for it needed only that the authority of the pagan be replaced by that of a purer faith. The pagan marvels were accepted almost in a body and many of them are briefly recited by Isidore.

How words breed legend is disclosed in the very title of the Etymologies. Carrying a little further the tradition of the Romans, with whom philology was almost as old as poetry and more important than natural science, Isidore seemed to think that when he had given the derivation of a term he had accomplished a complete description of the thing that bore its name. Words themselves were things transcendental. Thus he defines Barbarism as "the uttering of a word with an error in a letter or in a quantity." Nox, the Latin word for night, “is derived from nocere (to injure) because it injures the eyes." "Homo is so named because he is made of humus (earth), as it is told in Genesis." "Corpus (the body) is so called because being corrupted it perishes."

Isidore writes the texts for the chapter in the history of marvel that deals with Christian fabulism, pilgriming, and cosmography. It is Christian only in the sense that Christians of the earlier centuries tell the tales, make the journeys, and construct the world theories. Its subject matter is Jewish and pagan, with the two elements sometimes in an artless, sometimes in a forced, combination; it presents one side of that contact and conflict between Aryan and Semitic cultures which is the history of the last nineteen centuries. For the first part of the period the result of the conflict in the field of geography, travel, and tradition was what might be expected where simple-witted peoples, lately emerged from barbarism and not yet nationally minded, meet a race of ancient culture and intense national spirit. Jewish conceptions prevailed. It was thought that children, if taught no other tongue, would naturally speak Hebrew. Europe accepted as a literal recital of fact the Sumerian legend preserved in Hebrew Scriptures that the human race began with Adam-"the mean, toolless and frivolous Adam," as Andrew Lang calls him—and his consort in the Garden of Eden; and from Hebrew chronology it figured that the earth must be about four thousand years old. It made over its geography to conform to Old Testament texts, and, discarding the world-knowledge of the classic civilizations, it made over its maps to show Jerusalem in the center of a flat earth.

When pilgrims to Palestine had visited the scenes of the birth and passion of Christ they proceeded to explore the Jewish back

ground for memorials of Old Testament history, with side trips into the realm of pagan marvel. All of them looked for the pillar of salt by the Dead Sea in which Lot's wife was entombed; for centuries this column comes and goes in their narratives. Silvia of Aquitaine, whose journey falls in the fourth century, says there was no pillar there-the sea had engulfed it-but others saw it later. Theodosius says it waxed and waned with the phases of the moon. Antoninus denies the report that pasturing sheep had diminished its size by licking it. A fragment of this marvel is in the Library of Congress at Washington, together with the report of an American traveler who measured the pillar and found it sixty feet high and forty feet around, larger than he believed Lot's wife could have been.

Other of the earlier pilgrims are said to have gone into Arabia to see the dunghill where Job contended with his comforters. The pyramids, some thought, were the barns of Joseph. The Apples of Adam still showed the marks of his teeth. The Jordan halted its waters at the time of the Epiphany. Devils were seen on Mount Gilboa. The torments of hell lay under the Sea of Sodom and Abbott Daniel had a whiff of them from its surface. In Samaria, Paula, friend of Saint Jerome, saw "devils writhing and yelling in different kinds of torture, and men before the tombs of the saints, howling like wolves, barking like dogs, roaring like lions, hissing like serpents, bellowing like bulls." One pilgrim writer copied another, few took any note of the natural features of Palestine, most of them were of primitive culture, and the women had a wider outlook than the

men.

The Jew, Rabbi Moses Petachia, made a pilgrimage, reporting among other things that the wind which blew from the shallow parts of the Sea of Azov, the Stagnant Sea of old geography, was fatal to passers-by; he saw on the Euphrates a flying camel which could go a mile in a second. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela undertook a remarkable journey in the twelfth century to learn the condition of the Jewish communities of the east. He brought back valuable information, but said he could not approach the vast ruins of Babylon because of the scorpions and serpents that haunted them, located mythical Jewish states in the deserts of Arabia, and repeated numerous fables on hearsay. If he ever

took this journey, says the elder Disraeli, it must have been with his nightcap on.

How the new peoples of the west lost the sense of historical perspective under the Jewish impact is shown in the long speculation over the whereabouts of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Classic learning was dismissed as "windy babble." The fate of the peoples of the great monarchies of antiquity aroused no curiosity. But everywhere were sought the footsteps of the vanished Israelites. They were imprisoned in the Caucasus, they had become Afghan mountaineers, they were privileged subjects of Prester John, they were settled in the Canaries, they had reached China, they had colonized Peru, they were the progenitors of the British and American peoples, they were the ancestors of the North American Indian, and the first Mormons.

While Europe was curious about the shrines, landmarks, and legends of Asia, and held it to be the continent of wonder, Asia did not return the interest. It had few travel tales to tell of the peoples of the west, few reports of any kind. The Chinese saw little of note in the Roman Empire, "Great China," save that it had good jugglers and asbestos cloth and that the eastern gate of Constantinople was covered with shining gold leaf and was two hundred feet high. India ignored the sea, and was selfcontained in its life and legends; the fabulous and felicitous peoples of the Puranas dwell in trans-Himalayan valleys. Arab sailors were carriers of Indian fables and may have taught them to the Chinese; a large part of Chinese marvel has a quality suggesting importation. Yet the superior historical sense of the Chinese, preserving almost intact marvel tales that were brought to them, made the rest of the world their debtor. Their encyclopædias and classics are quite in the style of Pliny, as, for example, the Shan Hai King, or Wonders by Land and Sea, to which the dates of B.C. 2700, 2205, and 222 have been severally ascribed, and which is also alleged to be a Taoist forgery of the fourth century A.D. Monster peoples and animals are in this work, and one of its early prefaces relates the journey of a king to the Halls of the Giants in the east, to the mansions of the Fairy Queen in the west, across a bridge of tortoises in the south and over streets made of feathers in the north. It is also recited that by imperial decree nine urns were set up in various

parts of China on which, to the fear of the people, the common and the strange animals of each region were pictured.

Religious fervor at length set the feet of Chinese upon paths along which wonder grew. Buddhist priests and scholars went east to teach and west to learn. If the annals of the Middle Kingdom are to be credited, a fair interpretation of the record is that the Chinese reached the coast of North America in A.D. 499 and again in 502 and 556. They found countries which they described as the Land of Marked Bodies and the Great Han country. The natives of the former had horses and draft deer with great horns (reindeer) and esteemed copper more than gold. A thousand furlongs east was the Kingdom of Women-erect, white-skinned, hairy, timorous, subsisting on a salt plant like wormwood. The residents of the Land of Marked Bodies, supposed to be the Aleutian Islands, were tattooed, joyous, rich in gold and silver. Eastward was Great Han, possibly British Columbia, the wild beasts of which devoured guilty criminals, but spared persons falsely accused. There was also a country of dog-headed men.

These lands have been identified with regions of northeastern Asia, and because of their climate and products with American regions as far south as California and Mexico.

The westward journeys of Buddhist scholars are historical and important. They went to India at various periods from the beginning of the fifth to the latter part of the seventh century of our era to study the Law of Buddha, to visit the sites associated with Sakya Muni and to collect sacred books and relics. One Chinese work has a record of fifty-six of these worthies. The Buddhist pilgrims were men of higher intelligence and still greater credulity than those who at about the same time were journeying out of Europe to the shrines of Palestine. Their largest figure, and one of the world's greatest travelers, is Hiouen Thsang, who left China in A.D. 629 and returned seventeen years later.

In the desert of Gobi, Hiouen saw spectral armies charging down upon him and at night the flare of spectral torches, but at a word of scripture the glamour faded. In the T'sung-ling mountains Fa-hien found poison dragons that spat the storm and avalanche; here, says Hiouen, one should not wear red garments