Father Bougeant calls his lucubration “a new system of philosophy”; but this is not strictly true. He has only given a fuller and more facetious exposition of a doctrine taught by many of the greatest lights of the Catholic Church, among others by Thomas Aquinas, whose authority as a thinker Pope Leo XIII. distinctly recognized and earnestly sought to restore to its former prestige. Bougeant’s ingenious dissertation has a vein of irony or at least a strain of jocundity in it, approaching at times so perilously near the fatal brink of persiflage, that one cannot help surmising an intention to render the whole thing ridiculous in a witty and underhand way eminently compatible with Jesuitical habits of mind; but whether serious or satirical, his treatise is an excellent example and illustration of the kind of dialectic hair-splitting and syllogistic rubbish, which passed for reasoning in the early and middle ages of the Christian era, and which the greatest scholars and acutest intellects of those days fondly indulged in and seem to have been fully satisfied with. Here, too, we come upon the metaphysical and theological groundwork, upon which was reared by a strictly logical process a vast superstructure of ecclesiastical excommunication and criminal prosecution against bugs and beasts. He protests with never-tiring and needless iteration his absolute devotion to the precepts of religion; indeed, like the lady in the play, he “protests too much, methinks.” In all humbleness and submission he bows to the authority of the Church, and would not touch the ark of the covenant even with the tip of his finger, but his easy acquiescence has an air of perfunctoriness, and in his assenting lips there lurks a secret, semi-sarcastic leer, which casts suspicion on his words and looks like poking fun at the principles he professes and turning them into raillery. Indeed, such covert derision would have been a suitable way of ridiculing the gross popular superstition of his time, which saw a diabolical incarnation in every unfamiliar form of animal life. During the latter half of the sixteenth century a Swiss naturalist named Thurneysser, who held the position of physician in ordinary to the Elector Johann Georg von Brandenburg, kept some scorpions bottled in olive oil, which were feared by the common people as terrible devils endowed with magic power (_fürchterliche Zauberteufel_). Thurneysser presented also to Basel, his native city, a large elk, which had been given to him by Prince Radziwil; but the good Baselers looked upon the strange animal as a most dangerous demon, and a pious old woman finally rid the town of the dreaded beast by feeding it with an apple stuck full of broken needles.