A creature called the stag-wolf, if we may credit these ancient authors (and there is much saving virtue in this if), had the curious peculiarity that if, while he was devouring his prey, he chanced to look backward, he straightway forgot that he was already provided with a dinner, and would at once start off for one with all the zeal that his supposititious famishing condition called for. The bear has not escaped the observation of the lover of the marvellous, though we should have thought that our forefathers, with their bear-baiting proclivities, would have had a sufficient knowledge of the creature to protect them from falling into gross error. One of the most firmly accepted beliefs in ancient and mediæval days was that the cubs were born a merely shapeless mass, and owed what after-beauty of form they possessed to the assiduous care of their mother. Hence, an ancient scribe hath it, “At the firste they seeme to be a lumpe of white flesh without any forme, little bigger than rattons, without eyes, and wanting hair. This rude lumpe, with licking, they fashion by little and little into some shape.” Shakespeare it will be remembered compares Gloucester, in King Henry VI., to “an unlick’d bear-whelp,” while Dryden writes:— “The cubs of bears a living lump appear When whelp’d, and no determined figure wear. The mother licks them into shape, and gives As much of form as she herself receives.” The device of the great Venetian painter, Titian, was a she-bear licking her cubs into shape.[54] Our readers will probably recall the lines in “Hudibras”:— “A bear’s a savage beast, of all Most ugly and unnatural; Whelp’d without form, until the dam Has lick’d it into shape and frame.” “Which opinion notwithstanding,” quoth Browne in his assault on the vulgar errors of his day, “is not only repugnant unto the sense of everyone that shall enquire into it, but of exact and deliberate experiment. It is, moreover, injurious unto reason, and much impugneth the course and providence of nature to conceive a birth should be ordained before there is a formation. Besides, what few take notice of, men do hereby in a high measure vilifie the works of God, imputing that unto the tongue of a Beast.” Browne’s ideas were, we have already seen, far in advance of his time, and he took the trouble to do what many who wrote on the subject before him failed to do, went to look at some young bears. Though the belief in the idea has died away, the remembrance of the superstition still survives in the notion of licking youngsters into shape at school by such appeals to body or mind as may seem most efficacious and persuasive. It was held that the bear found no little nutriment in sucking his own paws, and in old books on natural history he may often be found thus figured. Beaumont and Fletcher embody the old belief in their “Bonduca,” where we read of those—