369-371, a very pious but very comical tradition regarding the beaver, hardly mentionable to ears polite.

For Friar Bartholomew, see (besides his book itself) Medieval Lore, edited by Robert Steele, London, 1893, pp.

118-138.
Here and there among men who were free from church control we have work of a better sort.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Abd Allatif made observations upon the natural history of Egypt which showed a truly scientific spirit, and the Emperor Frederick II attempted to promote a more fruitful study of Nature; but one of these men was abhorred as a Mussulman and the other as an infidel.

Far more in accordance with the spirit of the time was the ecclesiastic Giraldus Cambrensis, whose book on the topography of Ireland bestows much attention upon the animals of the island, and rarely fails to make each contribute an appropriate moral.