So great was the authority of ARISTOTLE, that ÆLIAN, who wrote two centuries later and borrowed many of his statements from the works of his predecessor, perpetuates this error; and, after describing the exploits of the trained elephants exhibited at Rome, adds the expression of his surprise, that an animal without joints ([Greek: anarthron]) should yet be able to dance.[1] The fiction was too agreeable to be readily abandoned by the poets of the Lower Empire and the Romancers of the middle ages; and PHILE, a contemporary of PETRARCH and DANTE, who in the early part of the fourteenth century, addressed his didactic poem on the elephant to the Emperor Andronicus II., untaught by the exposition of ARISTOTLE, still clung to the old delusion, [Greek: "Podes de toutps thauma kai saphes teras, Ous, ou kathaper talla tôn zôôn genê, Eiôthe kinein ex anarthrôn klasmatôn, Kai gar stibarois syntethentes osteois, Kai tê pladara tôn sphyrôn katastasei, Kai tê pros arthra tôn skelôn hypokrisei, Nyn eis tonous agousi, nyn eis hypheseis, Tas pantodapas ekdromas tou thêriou. * * * * * Brachyterous ontas de ton opisthiôn 'Anamphilektôs oida tous emprosthious Toutois elephas entatheis osper stylois 'Orthostadên akamptos hypnôttôn menei."] v. 106, &c. [Footnote 1: [Greek: "Zpson de anarthron sunienai kai rhuthmou kai melous, kai phylattein schêma physeôs dôra tauta hama kai idiotês kath' ekaston ekplêktikê]."--ÆLIAN, _De Nat. Anim_., lib. ii. cap. xi.] SOLINUS introduced the same fable into his _Polyhistor_; and DICUIL, the Irish commentator of the ninth century, who had an opportunity of seeing the elephant sent by Haroun Alraschid as a present to Charlemagne[1] in the year 802, corrects the error, and attributes its perpetuation to the circumstance that the joints in the elephant's leg are not very apparent, except when he lies down.[2] [Footnote 1: Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, c. xvi. and _Annales Francorum_, A.D. 810.] [Footnote 2: "Sed idem Julius, unum de elephantibus mentions, falso loquitur; dicens elephantem nunquam jacere; dum ille sicut bos certissime jacet, ut populi communiter regni Francorum elephantem, in tempore Imperatoris Karoli viderunt. Sed, forsitan, ideo hoc de elephante ficte æstimando scriptum est, eo quod genua et suffragines sui nisi quando jacet, non palam apparent."--DICUILUS, _De Mensura Orbis Terræ_, c. vii.] It is a strong illustration of the vitality of error, that the delusion thus exposed by Dicuil in the ninth century, was revived by MATTHEW PARIS in the thirteenth; and stranger still, that Matthew not only saw but made a drawing of the elephant presented to King Henry III. by the King of France in 1255, in which he nevertheless represents the legs as without joints.[1] [Footnote 1: _Cotton MSS_. NERO. D. 1. fol. 168, b.]