Records of 144 such trials have come to light. Of the two I have described, it will be remarked that one belongs, as it were, to criminal and the other to civil law. The last class is the most curious. No doubt the trial of flies or locusts was resorted to when other means of getting rid of them had failed; it was hoped, somehow, that the elaborate appearance of fair-play would bring about a result not to be obtained by violence. We can hardly resist the inference that they involved some sort of recognition or intuition of animals’ rights and even of animal intelligence. In the dawn of modern literature animals played a large, though artificial, part which must not be quite ignored on account of its artificiality, because in the Bestiaries as in the Æsopic and Oriental fables from which they were mainly derived, there was an inextricable tangle of observations of the real creature and arbitrary ascription to him of human qualities and adventures. At last they became a mere method for attacking political or ecclesiastical abuses, but their great popularity was as much due to their outer as to their inner sense. There is not any doubt that at the same time floods of Eastern fairy-tales were migrating to Europe, and in these the most highly appreciated hero was always the friendly beast. In a romance of the thirteenth century called “Guillaume de Palerme” all previous marvels of this kind were outdone by the story of a Sicilian prince who was befriended by a were-wolf! It is not generally remembered that the Indian or Buddhist view of animals must have been pretty well known in Europe at least as early as the fourteenth century. The account of the monastery “where many strange beasts of divers kinds do live upon a hill,” which Fra Odoric, of Pordenone, dictated in 1330, is a description, both accurate and charming, of a Buddhist animal refuge, and in the version given of it in Mandeville’s “Travels,” if not in the original, it must have been read by nearly every one who could read, for no book ever had so vast a diffusion as the “Travels” of the elusive Knight of St. Albans.