truisms. If the chivalric lion be red and rampant, it is rigidly red and rampant ; if the sacred ibis stands anywhere on one leg, it stands on one leg for ever. In this language, like a large animal alphabet, are written some of the first philosophic certainties of men. As the child learns A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow, so man has learnt here to connect the simpler and stronger creatures with the simpler and stronger truths. That a flowing stream cannot befoul its own fountain, and that any one who says it does is a tyrant and a liar ; that a mouse is too weak to fight a lion, but too strong for the cords that can hold a lion ; that a fox who gets most out of a flat dish may easily get least out of a deep dish ; that the crow whom the gods forbid to sing, the gods nevertheless provide with cheese ; that when the goat insults from a mountain-top it is not the goat that insults, but the mountain : all these are deep truths deeply graven on the rocks wherever men have passed. It matters nothing how old they are, or how new ; they are the alphabet of humanity, which like so many forms of primitive picture-writing employs any living symbol in preference to man. These ancient and universal tales are all of animals ; as the latest discoveries in the oldest prehistoric caverns are all of animals. Man, in his simpler states, always felt that he himself was something too x