[318] Verg. Aen. 4, 487–491, not quoted directly but taken from Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 21, 6.
[319] From Augustine, De Civitate Dei, bk. vii. cap. 35.
[320] The reference is to heathen gods.
[321] Isidore gives a table of “the prohibited degrees” within which marriage was forbidden by the rule of the church. Since the introduction of Christianity these had been steadily extended until in Isidore’s lifetime intermarriage within the seventh degree was prohibited by Pope Gregory. The analogy between the wide extension of “the prohibited degrees” in the dark ages and that found among primitive peoples generally is remarkable. Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 297, says: “As a rule among primitive peoples unaffected by modern civilization, the prohibited degrees are more numerous than in advanced communities, the prohibitions in many cases referring even to all the members of a tribe or clan.” For an account of this development of marriage, see Westermarck, op. cit., p. 308, and Smith and Cheetham’s Christian Antiquities, art. “Prohibited Degrees.” This social phenomenon of the dark ages is a development parallel to the recrudescence of the primitive in the intellectual sphere which is illustrated in so marked a manner in the Etymologies (cf. pp. 50–54).
[322] Corporaliter.
[323] The names of the nations are enumerated in the preceding sections.
[324] The name China appeared for the first time in the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes. It does not appear in the Etymologies.
[325] This is the only part of the Etymologies in which Isidore gives up every principle of organization of his subject-matter except the alphabetical one. Elsewhere the terms are grouped according to their meaning, with sometimes traces of alphabetical order in the groups, but here the dictionary method alone is used.
[326] Grandson, sometimes has meaning of prodigal, spendthrift.
[327] In the first part of book xi are contained the remnants of the sciences of human anatomy and physiology as the ancients had known them. The second part is devoted to unnatural births, which were regarded as having a prophetic meaning, and to monstrous races. It is not known what were Isidore’s immediate sources for bk. xi. Most of the natural science of the later Roman empire, however, was drawn ultimately from Pliny. To correspond to Isidore’s topics in this book of the Etymologies, comparative anatomy and physiology are found in Pliny’s Natural History, bk. xi, ch. 44 et seq., and chapters on monstrous races (Gentium mirabiles figurae) and on unusual and unnatural births (prodigiosi, monstruosi partus) are found in bk. vii.