Among the many curious customs And superstitions preserved in the records of the Middle Ages, few are more strange and in teresting than the legal proceedings, civil, criminal, and ecclesiastic, brought against offending animals. So strange are some of

superstitions preserved in the records of the Middle Ages, few are more strange and in teresting than the legal proceedings, civil, criminal, and ecclesiastic, brought against offending animals. So strange are some of these records (writes B. T. Withington, in the “ Cornhill Magazine,”) that it was sug gested that they were composed by ancient lawyers or their clerks as amusing exercises for leisure hours, till they were shown to be genuine by the researches of such writers as Menabrea, Agnel, and Berriat St. JPrix. However fabulous may be the story of the Jackdaw of Rheims, it is an historcal fact that a cock was publicly burnt at Basle, in August, 1474, for the diabolical crime of lay ing an egg, the egg being also burnt lest it should produde a cockatrice, or fiery flying serpent. “On the Thursday before St. Laurence’s Day,” writes Gross in his “ Kurtze Easier Kronik,” they burnt a cock on the Kolenberg, together with an egg which he had laid, for they feared that a dragon might be hatched .therefrom. The executioner cut open the cock and found three more eggs in him. For, as Yicentius saith in the sixth book of his “ Speculum Naturals,” it hath always been held that a cock in his old age may lay an egg whence ariseth a basilisk, if it be hatched out on a dung-heap by the serpent called coluber. Wherefore the basilisk is half cock and half serpent. He saith also that certain persons declare that they have seen basilisks hatched from such eggs.” But the animal which most frequently came before the criminal courts was the pig. At Mensil St. Denis, near Paris, there still exists a spot called Truye Pendue, after a sow which was once hanged there for killing an infant, and about twenty' similar cases are recorded in France alone by the writers above mentioned. Thus, in 1386, the Magis trates of Falaise condemned a pig to have its snout and One leg cut off, and then to be hanged for having killed an infant and eaten part of its face and arm. 