Symbolism and personification, as applied to animals and inanimate objects, unquestionably played an important part in primitive legislation, but this principle does not account for the excommunication and anathematization of noxious vermin or for the criminal prosecution and capital punishment of homicidal beasts, nor does it throw the faintest light upon the origin and purpose of such proceedings. Osenbrüggen’s statement that the cock condemned to be burned at Bâle was personified as a heretic (Ketzer) and therefore sentenced to the stake, is a far-fetched and wholly fanciful explanation. As we have already seen, the unfortunate fowl, suspected of laying an egg in violation of its nature, was feared as an abnormal, inauspicious, and therefore diabolic creature; the fatal cockatrice, which was supposed to issue from this egg when hatched, and the use which might be made of its contents for promoting intercourse with evil spirits, caused such a cock to be dreaded as a dangerous purveyor to His Satanic Majesty, but no member of the Kohlenberg Court ever thought of consigning Chanticleer to the flames as the peer of Wycliffe or of Huss in heresy. The judicial prosecution of animals, resulting in their excommunication by the Church or their execution by the hangman, had its origin in the common superstition of the age, which has left such a tragical record of itself in the incredibly absurd and atrocious annals of witchcraft. The same ancient code that condemned a homicidal ox to be stoned, declared that a witch should not be suffered to live, and although the Jewish lawgiver may have regarded the former enactment chiefly as a police regulation designed to protect persons against unruly cattle, it was, like the decree of death against witches, genetically connected with the Hebrew cult and had therefore an essentially religious character. It was these two paragraphs of the Mosaic law that Christian tribunals in the Middle Ages were wont to adduce as their authority for prosecuting and punishing both classes of delinquents, although in the application of them they were undoubtedly incited by motives and influenced by fears wholly foreign to the mind of the Levitical legislator. The extension of Christianity beyond the boundaries of Judaism and the conversion of Gentile nations led to its gradual but radical transformation. The propagation of the new and aggressive faith among the Greeks and Romans, and especially among the Indo-Germanic tribes of Northern Europe, necessarily deposed, degraded and demonized the ancestral deities of the proselytes, who were taught henceforth to abjure the gods of their fathers and to denounce them as devils. Thus missionary zeal and success, while saving human souls from endless perdition, served also to enlarge the realm of the Prince of Darkness and to increase the number of his subjects and satellites. The new convert saw them with his mind’s eye skulking about in obscure places,