Therefore, when he seeth ships in great wind
he flieth against the sail to take the cold wind, and overthroweth
the ship."
These ideas of Friar Bartholomew spread far and struck deep into
the popular mind. His book was translated into the principal
languages of Europe, and was one of those most generally read
during the Ages of Faith. It maintained its position nearly three
hundred years; even after the invention of printing it held its
own, and in the fifteenth century there were issued no less than
ten editions of it in Latin, four in French, and various versions
of it in Dutch, Spanish, and English. Preachers found it especially
useful in illustrating the ways of God to man. It was only when the
great voyages of discovery substituted ascertained fact for
theological reasoning in this province that its authority was broken.
The same sort of science flourished in the _Bestiaries_, which were
used everywhere, and especially in the pulpits, for the edification
of the faithful. In all of these, as in that compiled early in the
thirteenth century by an ecclesiastic, William of Normandy, we have
this lesson, borrowed from the _Physiologus_: "The lioness giveth
birth to cubs which remain three days without life.
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