The tenth book, in nine brief chapters, is entitled, “Form and Matter,” but after one chapter on form, discusses the elements. An element, according to Constantinus, is a simple substance and the least particle of a compound body. The rest of the chapters are devoted to the particular element fire and to things closely associated with it, such as flame, smoke, sparks, and ashes. Carbo, “Rabanus says, is fire actually incorporated and united with earthly matter.” Bartholomew’s further description suggests our coal, but perhaps he has only charcoal in mind.
Air and its creatures.
The eleventh book treats in sixteen chapters of the element air and its “passions,” such as winds, clouds, rainbows, dew, rain, hail, snow, thunder and lightning, and leads up to the following book on birds, or rather, creatures of the air, since bees, flies, crickets, locusts, bats, and griffins are included in the alphabetical list of thirty-eight chapters. The birds described are for the most part familiar ones: the eagle, hawk, owl, dove, turtle-dove, quail, stork, crow, crane, hen, swallow, kite, partridge, peacock, pelican, screech-owl, sparrow, vulture, hoopoe, phoenix. Some of these creatures place precious stones in their nests to keep off snakes, the eagle employing the gem achates[1371] and the griffin an emerald.[1372]
The swallow, swallow-stone, and swallow-wort.
Swallows have gems called celidonii in their gizzards, one white and one red. The red variety is called masculine because it is of greater virtue than the white kind. These stones are especially valuable if they have been extracted from the chick before it touches the ground, “as is said in Lapidarius where their virtues are described as Constantinus says.”[1373] Lapidarius can scarcely mean Marbod’s poem on gems, since he wrote later than Constantinus Africanus, and while he discusses the chelidonius, he says nothing of extracting it so soon and describes the colors of its two varieties as black and red,[1374] and so does Bartholomew later on.[1375] Marcellus Empiricus had called them black and white.[1376] Chelidonius seems to be derived from the Greek word for swallow, χελιδών, and to mean the swallow-stone. Pliny mentions two varieties but simply states that they are like the swallow in color, not that they come from its gizzard. Furthermore he describes the color of one as purple on one side, of the other as “purple besprinkled with black spots.”[1377] Solinus mentions swallows but says nothing of any stone connected with them. Bartholomew, however, also mentions the herb celidonia or swallow-wort. He cites Macrobius for the story that, if anyone blinds the young of swallows, the parent birds restore their offspring’s sight by anointing their eyes with the juice of this herb, a statement which is also found in Pliny.[1378] Not only does the swallow contain gems of great virtue and know of healing herbs; it has medical properties itself. For instance, blood extracted from its right wing is a remedy for the eyes.
The hoopoe and magic.
Of the birds described by Bartholomew the upupa or hoopoe is especially associated with the practice of magic. Pliny cites the poet Aeschylus as saying that the bird changes its form;[1379] and from Aristotle to modern French peasants it has been believed to build its nest of human ordure.[1380] After quoting Isidore, who in part uses Pliny,[1381] for the bird’s supposed filthy habits, its frequenting sepulchers, and the statement that anyone anointed with its blood will see demons suffocating him in his dreams, Bartholomew adds that its heart is used in sorceries. Students of nature (Phisici) say that when it grows old and cannot see or fly, its offspring tear off its outworn pinions and bathe its eyes with the juices of herbs—thus just reversing the relation between the swallow and its young—and warm it under their wings until its feathers grow again and, perfectly renovated, it is able to see and fly as well as they. In Basil’s Hexaemeron a similar story is told of the filial devotion of young storks toward their aged parent. The hoopoe’s renovation by its young also is included in the Latin bestiaries,[1382] but Bartholomew appears to cite Phisici rather than Physiologus.[1383] Thomas of Cantimpré’s chapter on the hoopoe is similar to Bartholomew’s except that all he says to connect it with magic is that anointing one’s temples with its blood protects one from sorcerers and enchanters; but “how this is, Experimenter does not state.” Vincent of Beauvais gives a somewhat fuller account of the hoopoe in his Speculum naturale and the bird’s properties are also treated by Albertus Magnus in his De animalibus,[1384] and in the De mirabilibus mundi ascribed to him, also by Petrus Hispanus in the Thesaurus pauperum,[1385] and by Arnald of Villanova in Remedia contra maleficia. For the use of the bird’s heart in magic Vincent cites a Liber de natura rerum, which perhaps is the Liber rerum cited by Thomas of Cantimpré, who, however, in that case failed to copy the statement in question. Vincent attributes to “Pythagoras in The Book of the Romans,” the statement that sprinkling a sleeping person with the blood of the hoopoe will cause him to see phantasms of demons, which is essentially the same statement that Bartholomew draws from Isidore and Pliny. But Bartholomew sometimes cites Pythagoras in The Book of the Romans. These instances show the difficulty of dealing with medieval citations, but on the whole indicate that Vincent used independently the same sources as Thomas and Bartholomew and made a different selection from them.
Waters and fish.
In the thirteenth book Bartholomew deals with the element water, with wells, streams, seas, ponds, pools, and drops of water, with some particular bodies of water such as the Tigris, Euphrates, Jordan, Lake of Tiberias, and Mediterranean Sea. In the last chapter fish are considered. As in the account of birds, use is made of Isidore and Pliny, notably concerning the cleverness with which fish escape the snares laid for them by fishermen. Some fish are said to help their fellows withdraw from the basket-like traps set for them by fishermen by seizing their tails in their mouths and pulling them out backwards. Aristotle, too, is cited and Avicenna is referred to several times on the question whether a particular fish is edible or not. But an authority especially employed in this chapter is Jorath or Iorat, who in the bibliography at the end of the work is called a Chaldean. From his book on animals Bartholomew takes such details as that there are fish who live only three hours, who conceive from dew alone or in accord with the phases of the moon and the rising and setting of the stars. Dolphins, when a man is drowning, can tell from the odor whether he has ever eaten the flesh of a dolphin. If he has not, they rescue him and bring him safe to land; if he has, they devour him on the spot.
Jorath on whales.