animals, but animals were endowed with the gifts peculiar to man. All
things were then possible. Standing as he seemed in the centre of a
plain of indefinite or interminable extent, how could any man limit the
productions or vagaries of Nature, even if he possessed far more than
the narrow experience of those days? Moreover, the boundary lines were
vague between the natural and supernatural, and the latter was supposed
to be constantly interposing in the ordinary affairs of life. Among
other beliefs then prevalent, was one in the existence of a kind of half
nature, such as that in Centaurs, dragons, and griffins. In the Assyrian
cuneiform inscriptions lately deciphered, we read, of one Heabani, a
semi-bovine hermit, supposed to have lived 2,200 B.C. Thus the
accounts in Scripture of the serpent accosting Eve, and of Balaam
arguing with his ass, would not have seemed so remarkable then as they
do to us. In an Egyptian novel--the oldest extant, cir. 1,400
B.C.--a cow tells Bata that his elder brother is standing
before him with his dagger ready to kill him. He understood, we are
told, the language of animals, and was afterwards transformed into a
bull. Greek tradition as recorded by Plato, Xenophon, Babrius, and
others, speaks of an early golden age in which men and animals held
colloquies together "as in our fables;" whence we should conclude this
much--that there was a time when poets very commonly introduced them as
holding conversations, and when philosophers illustrated their doctrines
from the animal world.

The fable, we are told, was "an invention of ancient Assyrian men in the
days of Ninus and Belus," and in confirmation of its Eastern origin, we
may observe that the apologues of Lokman are of Indian derivation. He is
supposed, by Arabian writers, to have been either a nephew of Abraham or
Job, or a counsellor of David or Solomon.