James 3:7

every kind of beasts Better, Every nature. This was, probably, intended by the translators, as being the old meaning of the word "kind," as in the "kindly fruits" ("natural products") of the Litany. So Chaucer, "A beautie that cometh not of kinde," Rom. of Rose, 2288, i. e. that is not natural. It may be noted that the Authorised Version in this instance returns to Wycliffe, who used the word in its old sense, and that all the intermediate versions give "nature." The fourfold classification is obviously intended to be exhaustive and "beasts" must therefore be taken in its common familiar meaning of "quadruped."

serpents is too specific for the third word, and it would be better to give the rendering which it commonly has elsewhere, of "creeping things."

is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind Better, the word being the same as in the first clause, " by the nature of man." The tense of the first verb implies "is continually being tamed." The assertion may seem at first somewhat hyperbolical, but the well-known cases of tame rats and tame wasps, the lion of Androcles and the white fawn of Sertorius, furnish what may well be termed "crucial instances" in support of it. The story related by Cassian (Coll. xxiv. 2), that St John in his old age kept a tame partridge, makes it probable that St James may have seen, among his fellow-teachers, such an instance of the power of man to tame the varied forms of animal life around him.