For example, he says that in Ireland "eagles live for so many ages that they seem to contend with eternity itself; so also the saints, having put off the old man and put on the new, obtain the blessed fruit of everlasting life." Again, he tells us: "Eagles often fly so high that their wings are scorched by the sun; so those who in the Holy Scriptures strive to unravel the deep and hidden secrets of the heavenly mysteries, beyond what is allowed, fall below, as if the wings of the presumptuous imaginations on which they are borne were scorched." In one of the great men of the following century appeared a gleam of healthful criticism: Albert the Great, in his work on the animals, dissents from the widespread belief that certain birds spring from trees and are nourished by the sap, and also from the theory that some are generated in the sea from decaying wood.
But it required many generations for such scepticism to produce much effect, and we find among the illustrations in an edition of Mandeville published just before the Reformation not only careful accounts but pictured representations both of birds and of beasts produced in the fruit of trees.( 15) (15) For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition in the Bohn Library, London, 1863, p.

30; for the Abd Allatif and Frederick II, see Hoefer, as above; for Albertus Magnus, see the De Animalibus, lib.

xxiii; for the illustrations in Mandeville, see the Strasburg edition, 1484; for the history of the myth of the tree which produces birds, see Max Muller's lectures on the Science of Language, second series, lect.

xii.
This general employment of natural science for pious purposes went on after the Reformation.

Luther frequently made this use of it, and his example controlled his followers.