In another place[105] he continues: ‘Some animals have teeth which serve them not save for fighting, and not for the mastication of their food. Such are the hog and the elephant, for the elephant’s tusks are of use to him in this matter as we have said. And there are animals which make no use of their teeth save for eating or fighting, nay, I believe that every animal having teeth will fight with them upon occasion, and some there are whose teeth are sharp and stand well apart, so that they are therewith furnished to tear prey: such is the lion. And those animals that have need to crop their food, as grass and the like, from the ground, have level and regular teeth, and not long tusks or canines, which would hinder them from cropping; and since in some kinds the males are more apt to anger than the females, tusks have been given them that they may defend the females, because these are weaker in themselves and of a worse complexion, and this is true in a general way of all animals, even in those kinds that eat no flesh, and need not their tusks for eating, but only for defence, such as boars, and this is the reason why they have the strength of which we have just spoken. It is the same with the camel, and so we pass to speak of this general truth as it appears with regard to all other means of defence. Hence hath the stag his horn and not the hind; the ram and not the ewe; the he-goat and not his female, and fish which eat not flesh have no need of teeth that are sharp.’ The city where these strange writings were deciphered and translated into Latin, being itself so strange and remote from the ways of modern life, had a certain poetic fitness as the scene where Michael Scot undertook his labours upon the Arabian authors. No passage of all their texts was more bizarre and tortuous than the mass of intricate lanes which formed then, as they form to-day, the thoroughfares of communication in Toledo. No hidden jewel of knowledge and observation could surprise and reward the translator in the midst of his tedious labours with a flash of sudden light and glory more unexpectedly delicious than that felt by the traveller, when, after long wandering in that maze and labyrinth, he finds a wider air; a stronger light beats before him, beckoning, and in a moment he stands in the full sunshine of the _plaza mayor_, with space to see and light to show the wonders of mind and hand, and all the toil of past ages in the fabric of the great cathedral.