has "dragon" instead of the "Leviathan" we may be more familiar with, and in the
Book III 223 swim back and forth with them in a shoal, waiting for those whose presence they are aware of to throw something in.
And so the point seems to me to be worth making that aquatic animals are here called reptiles or crawling things in exactly the same way as birds are called flying things. I mean if it were their lack of memory or dullness of sensation that deprived fishes of the title of "live souls," this would surely be granted to the birds, whose way of life we can observe with our own eyes to be both governed by memory and very talkative and to display great skill in the building of nests and the rearing of their chicks.
Refutation ofthose natural scientists who allotted each element its own animals
9, 13. 1 am also aware that some natural scientists14 have classified animals in such a way as not only to call those ones terrestrial or earthy which crawl or walk on land, but to include bird rnJms class as well, because they too take their rest on land when they are ti; *lying, while they say that the airy animals are demons, and the heaver, - , •j ids—our term for some of these is luminaries, i -IS 111. „. for others angels. The sa«L ^ . *Je, all the same, attribute to the waters the fishes and monsters sui generis, so that no element may be without its animals—as if, forsooth, there were no earth under the waters, or they could prove that fishes do not rest on it and thus restore their strength for swimming as the birds do for flying. Of course fishes, doubtless, do this less often than birds, because water is more effective than air at holding up bodies, so that it will also support land animals swimming, whether they have learned how to do this, like human beings, or do it naturally like quadrupeds or snakes.
Or if the reason they give for not accepting this argument is that fishes do not have feet, then it means that seals do not belong to the water, nor serpents and snails to the land or earth, seeing that the former have feet, while the latter, without any feet, l will not say rest on the earth, but hardly ever, if indeed ever, move away from it. As for dragons, which lack feet, they are said to take their rest in caves, and to soar up into the air. While these are not too easy to come across, this kind ofanimated creature is for all that definitely mentioned not only in our literature15 but also in that of the Gentiles.
14. He says philosophos. But "philosophers" nowadays inhabit a rather different suburb of Academia, or rather a much narrower one. Aristotle, the philosopher of the ancient world for the scholastics, was also the leading natural scientist. 15. See, for example Psalms 74: 14 and 1 04:26, where Augustine's text, following the Septuagint, has "dragon" instead of the "Leviathan" we may be more familiar with, and in the deutero-canonical literature the story of Bel and the Dragon (Daniel 14 in the Septuagint and Vulgate). He goes on to mention the literature of "the Gentiles," that is to say pagan Greek and Latin legends—Perseus, for example, rescuing Andromeda from the dragon—because the people he is criticizing would not accept the authority of "our literature."