The Background in Folklore. The cleverness, the
stupidity, the faithfulness, the prudence, the temper-
ance, as well as their antitheses, of certain beasts is
witnessed in fables and legends which go back to early
Indian civilization. The Sanskrit book of parables
Pañchatantra, like the Pali Buddhistic Jātaka, is full
of such tales, and they reappear in Aesop, Babrius, and
Phaedrus. They are retold, as in Reynard the Fox (Le
Roman de Reynard, ca. 1170-1250), and with elegance
by Jean de La Fontaine in the seventeenth century.
But alongside such legends and fantasies we find Aris-
totle listing animal characteristics in the opening of
Book VIII of his Historia animalium. There he points
out that human psychological traits are shared by the
beasts—traits such as gentleness or fierceness, mildness
or cross temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence,
high spirit or low cunning, and “something akin to
sagacity.”
Sometimes, as in Pliny and Aelian, science and folk-
lore were blended and stories of the most improbable
kind were preserved for future generations to use as
scientific fact. Such stories include that of Chrysippus'
dog which, looking for its master in a wood, comes
to a triple fork. He sniffs down two of the branches
and finds no scent of his master. He then without
sniffing darts down the third branch, thus proving his
reasoning powers. It was, as appears, customary to
explain the behavior of the beast in human terms,
projecting into them the same psychological motives
that might be found in human beings on analogous
occasions.
