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 (ἄναρθρον) should yet be able to dance.[55] 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, Πόδες δὲ τούτῳ θαῦμα καὶ σαφὲς τέρας, Οὓς, οὐ καθάπερ τἆλλα τῶν ζώων γένη, Εἴωθε κινεῖν ἐξ ἀνάρθρων κλασμάτων· Καὶ γὰρ στιβαροῖς συντεθέντες ὀστέοις, Καὶ τῇ πλαδαρᾷ τῶν σφυρῶν καταστάσει, Καὶ τῇ πρὸς ἄρθρα τῶν σκελῶν ὑποκρίσει, Νῦν εἰς τόνους ἄγουσι, νῦν εἰς ὑφέσεις, Τὰς παντοδαπὰς ἐκδρομὰς τοῦ θηρίου. * * * * * Βραχυτέρους ὄντας δὲ τῶν ὀπισθίων Ἀναμφιλέκτως οἶδα τοὺς ἐμπροσθίους· Τούτοις ἐλέφας ἐνταθεὶς ὥσπερ στύλοις Ὀρθοστάδην ἄκαμπτος ὑπνώττων μένει. v. 106, &c. 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[56] 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.[57] 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.[58] In the numerous mediæval treatises on natural history, known under the title of _Bestiaries_, this delusion regarding the elephant is often repeated; and it is given at length in a metrical version of the _Physiologus_ of THEORALDUS, amongst the Arundel Manuscripts in the British Museum.[59] With the Provençal song writers, the helplessness of the fallen elephant was a favourite simile, and amongst others RICHARD DE BARBEZIEUX, in the latter half of the twelfth century, sung,[60] “Atressi cum l’olifans Que quan chai no s’ pot levar.” As elephants were but rarely seen in Europe prior to the seventeenth century, there were but few opportunities of correcting the popular fallacy by ocular demonstration. Hence SHAKSPEARE still believed that, “The elephant hath joints; but none for courtesy; His legs are for necessity, not flexure:”[61] and DONNE sang of