So great was the authority of ARISTOTLE, that AELIAN, 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 ([Greek:  anarthron]) should yet be able to dance.[1] 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,

[Greek: 
  “Podes de toutps thauma kai saphes teras,
  Ous, ou kathaper talla ton zoon gene,
  Eiothe kinein ex anarthron klasmaton,
  Kai gar stibarois syntethentes osteois,
  Kai te pladara ton sphyron katastasei,
  Kai te pros arthra ton skelon hypokrisei,
  Nyn eis tonous agousi, nyn eis hypheseis,
  Tas pantodapas ekdromas tou theriou.

* * * * *

Brachyterous ontas de ton opisthion
’Anamphilektos oida tous emprosthious
Toutois elephas entatheis osper stylois
’Orthostaden akamptos hypnotton menei.”]

          
                                                v. 106, &c.

[Footnote 1:  [Greek:  “Zpson de anarthron sunienai kai rhuthmou kai melous, kai phylattein schema physeos dora tauta hama kai idiotes kath’ ekaston ekplektike].”—­AELIAN, De Nat.  Anim., lib. ii. cap. xi.]

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[1] 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.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Eginhard, Vita Karoli, c. xvi. and Annales Francorum, A.D. 810.]

[Footnote 2:  “Sed idem Julius, unum de elephantibus mentions, falso loquitur; dicens elephantem nunquam jacere; dum ille sicut bos certissime jacet, ut populi communiter regni Francorum elephantem, in tempore Imperatoris Karoli viderunt.  Sed, forsitan, ideo hoc de elephante ficte aestimando scriptum est, eo quod genua et suffragines sui nisi quando jacet, non palam apparent.”—­DICUILUS, De Mensura Orbis Terrae, c. vii.]

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.[1]