in elasticity and fulness with advancing age, the wrinkles at
right angles to the course of the muscular fibres become permanent.
(5) To some extent habitual muscular action of this kind may, by
affecting local nutrition, alter the contour of such bones and cartilages
as are related to the muscles of expression. (6) If the mental disposition
and proneness to action are inherited by children from their
parents, it may be that the facility in, and disposition towards,
certain forms of expression are in like manner matters of heredity.
Illustrations of these theoretic propositions are to be found in the works of Bell, Duchenne and Darwin, and in the later publications of Theodor Piderit, Mimike und Physiognomik (1886) and Mantegazza, Physiognomy and Expression (1890) to which the student may be referred for further information.
For information on artistic anatomy as applied to physiognomy see the catalogue of sixty-two authors by Ludwig Choulant, Geschichte und Bibliographie der anatomischen Abbildung, &c. (Leipzig, 1852), and the works of the authors enumerated above, especially those of Aristotle, Franz, Porta, Cardan, Corvus and Bulwer. For physiognomy of disease, besides the usual medical handbooks, see Cabuchet, Essai sur l’expression de la face dans les maladies (Paris, 1801); Mantegazza, Physiology of Pain (1893), and Polli, Saggio di fisiognomomia e potognomomia (1837). For ethnological physiognomy, see amongst older authors Gratarolus, and amongst moderns the writers cited in the various textbooks on anthropology, especially Schadow, Physionomies nationales (1835) and Park Harrison, Journ. Anthrop. Inst. (1883). The study of the physical characteristics of criminals is discussed at great length by Lombroso, L’Uomo deliquente (1897); Ferri, L’Omicidio (1895); von Baer, Der Verbrecher (1893); Laurent, Les Habitués des prisons (1890); and Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (1901). (A. Ma.)
PHYSIOLOGUS, the title usually given to collection of some fifty Christian allegories much read in the middle ages, and still existing in several forms and in about a dozen Eastern and Western languages. As nearly all its imagery is taken from the animal world, it is also known as the Bestiary. There can be hardly a doubt about the time and general circumstances of its origin. Christian teachers, especially those who had a leaning
towards Gnostic speculations, took an interest in natural history, partly because of certain passages of Scripture that they wanted
to explain, and partly on account of the divine revelation in the
book of nature, of which also it was man’s sacred duty to take
proper advantage. Both lines of study were readily combined
by applying to the interpretation of descriptions of natural
objects the allegorical method adopted for the interpretation of
Biblical texts. Now the early Christian centuries were anything
but a period of scientific research. Rhetorical accomplishments
were considered to be the chief object of a liberal education, and
to this end every kind of learning was made subservient. Instead
of reading Aristotle and other naturalists, people went for
information to commonplace books like those of Aelian, in which
scraps of folk-lore, travellers’ tales and fragments of misapprehended
science were set forth in an elegant style. Theological
writers were not in the least prepared to question the worth of
the marvellous descriptions of creatures that were current in
the schools on the faith of authorities vaguely known as “the
history of animals,” “the naturalists,” and “the naturalist” in
the singular number (φυσιολόγος).[1] So they took their notions
of strange beasts and other marvels of the visible world on
trust and did their best to make them available for religious
instruction. In some measure we find this practice adopted by
more than one of the Fathers, but it was the Alexandrian school,
with its pronounced taste for symbolism, that made the most of
it. Clement himself had declared that natural lore, as taught
in the course of higher Christian education according to the
canon of truth, ought to proceed from “cosmogony” to “the
theological idea,”[2] and even in the little that is left of the works
of Origen we have two instances of the proceeding in question.
And yet the fact that these reappear in the Physiologus would
not suffice to stamp the work as a series of extracts from Alexandrian
writings, as parallels of the same kind can be adduced
from Epiphanius (loc. cit.) and Ephraem Syrus (Opp. Syr. ii.
17, 130). Father Cahier would even trace the book to Tatian,
and it is true that that heresiarch mentions a writing of his own
upon animals. Still, the context in which the quotation occurs
makes it evident that the subject-matter was not the nature of
particular species nor the spiritual lessons to be drawn therefrom,
but rather the place occupied by animal beings in the system of
creation. On the other hand, the opinion of Cardinal Pitra,
who referred the Physiologus to the more orthodox though
somewhat peculiar teaching of the Alexandrians, is fully borne
out by a close examination of the irregularities of doctrine
pointed out in the Physiologus by Cahier, all of which are to be
met with in Origen. The technical words by which the process
of allegorizing is designated in the Physiologus, like ἑρμηνία,
θεωρία, ἀναγωγή, ἀλληγορία, are familiar to the students
of Alexandrian exegesis. It has, moreover, been remarked
that almost all the animals mentioned were at home in the
Egypt of those days, or at least, like the elephant, were to be seen
there occasionally, whereas the structure of the hedgehog, for
instance, is explained by a reference to the sea-porcupine, better
known to fish-buyers on the Mediterranean. The fables of the
phoenix and of the conduct of the wild ass and the ape at the
time of the equinox owe their origin to astronomical symbols
belonging to the Nile country.[3] In both chapters an Egyptian
month is named, and elsewhere the antelope bears its Coptic
name of “antholops.”
That the substance of the Physiologus was borrowed from commentaries on Scripture[4] is confirmed by many of the sections opening with a text, followed up by some such formula as “but the Physiologus says.” When zoological records failed, Egypto-Hellenic ingenuity was never at a loss for a fanciful invention distilled from the text itself, but which to succeeding copyists appeared as part of the teaching of the original Physiologus. As a typical instance we may take the chapter on the ant-lion—not the insect, but an imaginary creature suggested by Job. iv. 11. The exceptional Hebrew for a lion (layish) appeared to the Septuagint translators to call for a special rendering, and as there was said to exist on the Arabian coast a lion-like animal called “myrmex” (see Strabo xvi. 774, Aelian, N.A., vii. 47) they ventured to give the compound noun “myrmekoleon.” After so many years the commentators had lost the key to this unusual term, and only knew that in common Greek “myrmex” meant an ant. So the text “the myrmekoleon hath perished for that he had no nourishment” set them pondering, and others reproduced their meditations, with the following result: “The Physiologus relates about the ant-lion: his father hath the shape of a lion, his mother that of an ant; the father liveth upon flesh, and the mother upon herbs. And these bring forth the ant-lion, a compound of both, and in part like to either, for his fore part is that of a lion, and his hind part like that of an ant. Being thus composed, he is neither able to eat flesh like his father, nor herbs like his mother; therefore he perisheth from inanition”; the moral follows.
At a later period, when the Church had learnt to look with suspicion upon devotional books likely to provoke the scoffing of some and lead others into heresy, a work of this kind could hardly meet with her approval. A synod of Pope Gelasius, held in 496, passed censure, among others, on the “Liber Physiologus, qui ab haereticis conscriptus est et B. Ambrosii nomine signatus, apocryphus,” and evidence has even been offered that a similar sentence was pronounced a century before. Still, in spite of such measures, the Physiologus, like the Church History of Eusebius or the Pastor of Hermas, continued to be read with general interest, and even Gregory the Great did not disdain to allude to it on occasion. Yet the Oriental versions, which had certainly nothing to do with the Church of Rome, show that there was no systematic revision made according to the catholic
- ↑ Origen, Sel. in Jerem. xvii. 11, ἐν τῆ περὶ ζῴων ὶστορίᾳ; Epiphan. Adv haer. i. 3, p. 274 (ed. D. Petav.), ὤς φασιν οἱ φυσιολόγοι; Origen, Hom. xvii., in Gen. xliv. 9, “nam physiologus de catulo leonis scribit.”
- ↑ Strom., iv. p 564 (ed. Potter), ἡ γοῦν κατά τὸν τῆς ἀγηθείας κανόνα γνωστικῆς παραδόσεως φυσιολογία, μᾶλλον δέ ἐποπτεία, ἐκ τοῦ περί κοσμογονίας ἤρτηται λόγου, ἐνθένδε ἀναβαίνουσα ἐπί τὸ θεολογικόν εἶδος.
- ↑ Cp. Leemans on Horapollo i. 16, 34.
- ↑ Including the Apocrypha. See the Icelandic account of the elephant, also a decidedly Alexandrian fragment upon the μάργος, founded upon 4 Macc. i. 3, which has got into the scholia upon the Odyssey xviii. 2 (ii. 533, ed. Dindorf, Oxford, 1855).
