Among the many proverbial expressions relating to birds, none, perhaps, is more often on the tongue than that which implies that the ostrich has the habit of sticking its head in the sand and regarding itself as thus made invisible. The oldest written authority known to me for this notion is the Historical Library of Diodorus Siculus. Describing Arabia and its products Diodorus writes:

It produces likewise Beasts of a double nature and mixt Shape; amongst whom are those that are called Struthocameli, who have the Shape both of a Camel and an Ostrich ... so that this creature seems both terrestrial and volatile, a Land-Beast and a Bird: But being not able to fly by reason of the Bulk of her body, she runs upon the Ground as Swift as if she flew in the air; and when she is pursued by Horsemen with her Feet she hurls the Stones that are under her, and many times kills the Pursuers with the Blows and Strokes they receive. When she is near being taken, she thrusts her Head under a Shrub or some such like Cover; not (as some suppose) through Folly or Blockishness, as if she would not see or be seen by them, but because her head is the tenderest Part of her Body.^[109]

It would appear from this that Diodorus was anticipating me by quoting an ancient legend only to show how erroneous it was; but the notion has survived his explanation, and supplies a figure of speech most useful to polemic editors and orators, nor does anyone seem to care whether or not it expresses a truth. The only foundation I can find or imagine for the origin of this so persistent and popular error in ornithology is that when the bird is brooding or resting it usually stretches its head and neck along the ground, and is likely to keep this prostrate position in cautious stillness as long as it thinks it has not been observed by whatever it fears. The futile trick of hiding its head alone has been attributed to various other birds equally innocent.

Ostriches in ancient times roamed the deserts of the East from the Atlas to the Indus, and they came to hold a very sinister position in the estimation of the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia, as we learn from the seals and tablets of Babylonia. There the eagle had become the type of the principle of Good in the universe, as is elsewhere described; and a composite monster, to which the general term “dragon” is applied, represented the principle of Evil. The earliest rude conception of this monster gave it a beast’s body (sometimes a crocodile’s but usually a lion’s), always with a bird’s wings, tail, etc. “From conceiving of the dragon as a monster having a bird’s head as well as wings and tail, and feathers over the body, the transition,” as Dr. Ward^[23] remarks, “was not difficult to regard it entirely as a bird. But for this the favorite form was that of an ostrich ... the largest bird known, a mysterious inhabitant of the deserts, swift to escape and dangerous to attack. No other bird was so aptly the emblem of power for mischief.... Accordingly, in the period of about the eighth to the seventh centuries, B. C., the contest of Marduk, representing Good in the form of a human hero or sometimes as an eagle, with an ostrich, or often a pair of them, representing the evil demon Tiamat, was a favorite subject with Babylonian artists in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates.”

In view of their inheritance of these ideas it is no wonder that Oriental writers far more recent told strange tales about this bird, especially as to its domestic habits, as is reflected in the book of Job, where a versified rendering of one passage (xxxix, 15, 16) runs thus:

This was more elegant than exact, for ostriches are exceedingly watchful and patient parents, as they have need to be, considering the perilous exposure of their nests on the ground, and the great number of enemies to which both eggs and young are exposed in the wilderness. Major S. Hamilton,^[110] than whom there is no better authority, testifies to this. “The hen-bird,” he says, “sits on the eggs by day and the cock relieves her at night, so that the eggs are never left unguarded during incubation.” The chicks are able to take care of themselves after a day or two, and there is no more foundation in fact for the Biblical charge of cruelty than for that other Oriental fable that this bird hatches its eggs not by brooding but by the rays of warmth and light from her eyes. “Both birds are employed,” the fable reads, “for if the gaze is suspended for only one moment the eggs are addled, whereupon these bad ones are at once broken.” It is to this fiction that Southey refers in Thalaba, the Destroyer:

Hence, as Burnaby tells us, ostrich eggs were hung in some Mohammedan mosques as a reminder that “God will break evil-doers as the ostrich her worthless eggs.” Professor E. A. Grosvenor notes in his elaborate volumes on Constantinople, that in the turbeh of Eyouk, the holiest building and shrine in the Ottoman world, are suspended “olive lamps and ostrich eggs, the latter significant of patience and faith.” Their meanings or at any rate the interpretations vary locally, but the shells themselves are favorite mosque ornaments all over Islam, and an extensive trans-Saharan caravan-trade in them still exists. Ostrich eggs as well as feathers were imported into ancient Egypt and Phoenicia from the Land of Punt (Somaliland) and their shells have been recovered from early tombs, or sometimes clay models of them, as at Hu, where Petrie found an example decorated with an imitation of the network of cords by which it could be carried about, just as is done to this day by the Central-African negroes, who utilize these shells as water-bottles, and carry a bundle of them in a netting bag. Other examples were painted; and Wilkinson surmises that these were suspended in the temples of the ancient Egyptians as they now are in those of the Copts. The Punic tombs about Carthage, and those of Mycenae, in Greece, have yielded painted shells of these eggs; and five were exhumed from an Etruscan tomb, ornamented with bands of fantastic figures of animals either engraved or painted on the shell, the incised lines filled with gold; what purpose they served, or whether any religious significance was attached to them, is not known. Eggs are still to be found in many Spanish churches hanging near the Altar: they are usually goose-eggs, but may be a reflection of the former Moorish liking for those of the ostrich in their houses of worship.

To return for a moment to the notion that the ostrich breaks any eggs that become addled (by the way, how could the bird know which were “gone bad”?), let me add a preposterous variation of this, quoted from a German source by Goldsmith^[32] in relation to the rhea, the South American cousin of the ostrich—all, of course, arrant nonsense:

The male compels twenty or more females to lay their eggs in one nest; he then, when they have done laying, chases them away and places himself upon the eggs; however, he takes the singular precaution of laying two of the number aside, which he does not sit upon. When the young one comes forth these two eggs are addled; which the male having foreseen, breaks one and then the other, upon which multitudes of flies are found to settle; and these supply the young brood with a sufficiency of provision till they are able to shift for themselves.

Another popular saying is: “I have the digestion of an ostrich!”

What does this mean? Ancient books went so far as to say that ostriches subsisted on iron alone, although they did not take the trouble to explain where in the desert they could obtain this vigorous diet. A picture in one of the Beast Books gives a recognizable sketch of the bird with a great key in its bill and near by a horseshoe for a second course. In heraldry, which is a museum of antique notions, the ostrich, when used as a bearing, is always depicted as holding in its mouth a Passion-nail (emblem of the Church militant), or a horseshoe (reminder of knightly Prowess on horseback), or a key (signifying religious and temporal power).

An amusing passage in Sir Thomas Browne’s famous book, Common and Vulgar Errors^[33]—which is a queer combination of sagacity, ignorance, superstition and credulity—is his solemn argument against the belief prevalent in his day (1605–82) that ostriches ate iron; but he quotes his predecessors from Aristotle down to show how many philosophers have given it credence without proof. The great misfortune of medieval thinkers appears to have been that they were bound hand and foot to the dead knowledge contained in ancient Greek and Latin books—a sort of mental mortmain that blocked any progress in science. They made of Aristotle, especially, a sort of sacred fetish, whose statements and conclusions must not be “checked” by any fresh observation or experiment. Browne was one of the first to exhibit a little independence of judgment, and to suspect that possibly, as Lowell puts it, “they didn’t know everything down in Judee.”

“As for Pliny,” Sir Thomas informs us, “he saith plainly that the ostrich concocteth whatever it eateth. Now the Doctor acknowledgeth it eats iron: ergo, according to Pliny it concocts iron. Africandus tells us that it devours iron. Farnelius is so far from extenuating the matter that he plainly confirms it, and shows that this concoction is performed by the nature of its whole essence. As for Riolanus, his denial without ground we regard not. Albertus speaks not of iron but of stones which it swallows and excludes again without nutriment.”

This is an excellent example of the way those old fellows considered a matter of fact as if it were one of opinion—as if the belief or non-belief of a bunch of ancients, who knew little or nothing of the subject, made a thing so or not so. Sir Thomas seems to have been struggling out of this fog of metaphysics and shyly squinting at the facts of nature; yet it is hard to follow his logic to the conclusion that the allegation of iron-eating and “concocting” (by which I suppose digestion is meant) is not true, but he was right. The poets, however, clung to the story. John Skelton (1460–1529) in his long poem Phyllip Sparrow writes of

Ben Johnson makes one of his characters in Every Man in his Humor assure another, who declares he could eat the very sword-hilts for hunger, that this is evidence that he has good digestive power—“You have an ostrich’s stomach.” And in Shakespeare’s Henry VI is the remark: “I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword.”

Readers of Goldsmith’s Animated Nature,^[32] published more than a century later (1774) as a popular book of instruction in natural history (about which he knew nothing by practical observation outside of an Irish county or two), learned that ostriches “will devour leather, hair, glass, stones, anything that is given them, but all metals lose a part of their weight and often the extremities of the figure.” That the people remembered this is shown by the fact that zoÖlogical gardens have lost many specimens of these birds, which seem to have a very weak sense of taste, because of their swallowing copper coins and other metallic objects fed to them by experimental visitors, which they could neither assimilate nor get rid of. It is quite likely that the bird’s reputation for living on iron was derived from similarly feeding the captive specimens kept for show in Rome and various Eastern cities, the fatal results of which were unnoticed by the populace. The wild ostrich contents itself with taking into its gizzard a few small stones, perhaps picked up and swallowed accidentally, which assist it in grinding hard food, as is the habit of many ground-feeding fowls. Much the same delusion exists with regard to the emeu.

If I were to repeat a tithe of the absurdities and medical superstitions (or pure quackery) related of birds in the “bestiaries,” as the books of the later medieval period answering to our natural histories were named, the reader would soon tire of my pages; but partly as a sample, and partly because the pelican is not only familiar in America but is constantly met in proverbs, in heraldry, and in ecclesiastical art and legend, I think it worth while to give some early explanations of the curious notion expressed in the heraldic phrase “the pelican in its piety.” It stands for a very ancient misunderstanding of the action of a mother-pelican alighting on her nest, and opening her beak so that her young ones may pick from her pouch the predigested fish she offers them within it. As the interior of her mouth is reddish, she appeared to some imaginative observer long ago to display a bleeding breast at which her nestlings were plucking. Now observe how, according to Hazlitt,^[84] that medieval nature-fakir, Philip de Thaum, who wrote The Anglo-Norman Bestiary about 1120, embroiders his ignorance to gratify the appetite of his age for marvels—sensations, as we say nowadays—and so sell his book:

“Of such a nature it is,” he says of the pelican, “when it comes to its young birds, and they are great and handsome, and it will fondle them, cover them with its wings; the little birds are fierce, take to pecking it—desire to eat it and pick out its two eyes; then it pecks and takes them, and slays them with torment; and thereupon leaves them—leaves them lying dead—then returns on the third day, is grieved to find them dead, and makes such lamentation, when it sees its little birds dead, that with its beak it strikes its body that the blood issues forth; the blood goes dropping, and falls on its young birds—the blood has such quality that by it they come to life——”

and so on, all in sober earnest. But he made a botch of it, for earlier and better accounts show that the male bird kills the youngsters because when they begin to grow large they rebel at his control and provoke him; when the mother returns she brings them to life by pouring over them her blood. Moreover, there crept in a further corruption of the legend to the effect that the nestlings were killed by snakes, as Drayton writes in his Noah’s Flood:

St. Jerome seems to have had this version in mind when he made the Christian application, saying that as the pelican’s young, “killed by serpents,” were saved by the mother’s blood, so was the salvation by the Christ related to those dead in sin. This point is elaborated somewhat in my chapter on Symbolism.

Before I leave this bird I want to quote a lovely paragraph on pelican habits, far more modern than anything “medieval,” for it is taken from the Arctic ZoÖlogy (1784) of Thomas Pennant, who was a good naturalist, but evidently a little credulous, although the first half of the quotation does not overstrain our faith. He is speaking of pelicans that he saw in Australia, and explains:

They feed upon fish, which they take sometimes by plunging from a great height in the air and seizing like the gannet; at other times they fish in concert, swimming in flocks, and forming a large circle in the great rivers which they gradually contract, beating the water with their wings and feet in order to drive the fish into the centre; which when they approach they open their vast mouths and fill their pouches with their prey, then incline their bills to empty the bag of the waters; after which they swim to shore and eat their booty in quiet.... It is said that when they make their nests in the dry deserts, they carry the water to their young in the vast pouches, and that the lions and beasts of prey come there to quench their thirst, sparing the young, the cause of this salutary provision. Possibly on this account the Egyptians style this bird the camel of the river—the Persians tacub, or water-carrier.

Now let us look at the Trochilus legend, and trace how an African plover became changed into an American hummingbird. The story, first published by Herodotus, that some sort of bird enters the mouth of a Nile crocodile dozing on the sand with its jaws open, and picks bits of food from the palate and teeth, apparently to the reptile’s satisfaction, is not altogether untrue. The bird alluded to is the Egyptian plover, which closely resembles the common British lapwing; and there seems to be no doubt that something of the sort does really take place when crocodiles are lying with open mouth on the Nile bank, as they often do. This lapwing has a tall, pointed crest standing up like a spur on the top of its head, and this fact gives “point,” in more senses than one, to the extraordinary version of the Herodotus story in one of the old plays, The White Devil, by John Webster (1612), where an actor says:

“Stay, my lord! I’ll tell you a tale. The crocodile, which lives in the river Nilus, hath a worm breeds i’ the teeth of ’t, which puts it to extreme anguish: a little bird, no bigger than a wren, is barber-surgeon to this crocodile; flies into the jaws of ’t, picks out the worm, and brings present remedy. The fish, glad of ease, but ingrateful to her that did it, that the bird may not talk largely of her abroad for nonpayment, closeth her chaps, intending to swallow her, and so put her to perpetual silence. But nature, loathing such ingratitude, hath armed this bird with a quill or prick on the head, top o’ the which wounds the crocodile i’ the mouth, forceth her open her bloody prison, and away flies the pretty tooth-picker from her cruel patient.”

A most curious series of mistakes has arisen around this matter. Linguists tell us that the common name among the ancient Greeks for a plover was trochilus (t???????), and that this is the word used by Herodotus for his crocodile-bird. But in certain passages of his History of Animals Aristotle uses this word to designate a wren; it has been supposed that this was a copyist’s error, writing carelessly t??????? for ’???????, but it was repeated by Pliny in recounting what Herodotus had related, and this naturally led to the statement by some medieval compilers that the crocodile’s tooth-cleaner was a wren. This, however, is not the limit of the confusion, for when American hummingbirds became known in Europe, and were placed by some naturalists of the 17th century in the LinnÆan genus (Trochilus) with the wrens, one writer at least, Paul Lucas, 1774 (if Brewer’s Handbook may be trusted), asserted that the hummingbird as well as the lapwing entered the jaws of Egyptian crocodiles—and that he had seen them do it!

This curious tissue of right and wrong was still further embroidered by somebody’s assertion that the diminutive attendant’s kindly purpose was “to pick from the teeth a little insect” that greatly annoyed the huge reptile. Even Tom Moore knew no better than to write in Lalla Rookh of

The full humor of this will be perceived by those who remember that hummingbirds are exclusively American—not Oriental. Finally LinnÆus confirmed all this mixture of mistakes by fastening the name TrochilidÆ on the Hummingbird family.

Finally, John Josselyn, Gent., in his Rarities of New England, calls our American chimney-swift a “troculus,” and describes its nesting absurdly thus:

The troculus—a small bird, black and white, no bigger than a swallow, the points of whose feathers are sharp, which they stick into the sides of the chymney (to rest themselves, their legs being exceedingly short) where they breed in nests made like a swallow’s nest, but of a glewy substance; and which is not fastened to the chymney as a swallow’s nest, but hangs down the chymney by a clew-like string a yard long. They commonly have four or five young ones; and when they go away, which is much about the time that swallows used to depart, they never fail to throw down one of their young birds into the room by way of gratitude. I have more than once observed, that, against the ruin of the family, these birds will suddenly forsake the house, and come no more.

Another unfortunate but long-accepted designation in systematic ornithology was attached by LinnÆus to the great bird of paradise in naming this species Paradisea apoda (footless); and it was done through an even worse misunderstanding than in the case of Trochilus—or else as a careless joke. It is true that at that time no perfect specimen had been seen in Europe; yet it is hard to understand LinnÉ’s act, for he could not have put more faith in the alleged natural footlessness of this bird than in the many other marvelous qualities ascribed to it. Wallace has recounted some of these myths in his Malay Archipelago.^[35]

When the earliest European voyagers reached the Moluccas in search of cloves and nutmegs, they were presented with the dried skins of birds so strange and beautiful as to excite the admiration even of those wealth-seeking rovers. The Malay traders gave them the name of “manuk dewata,” or God’s birds; and the Portuguese, finding they had no feet or wings, and being unable to learn anything authentic about them, called them “passares de sol” or birds of the sun; while the learned Dutchmen, who wrote in Latin, called them avis paradeus or paradise-bird. Jan van Linschoten gives these names in 1598, and tells us that no one has seen these birds alive, for they live in the air, always turning toward the sun, and never lighting on the earth till they die; for they have neither feet nor wings, as he adds, may be seen by the birds carried to India, and sometimes to Holland, but being very costly they were rarely seen in Europe. More than a hundred years later Mr. William Fennel, who accompanied Dampier ... saw specimens at Amboyna and was told that they came to Banda to eat nutmegs, which intoxicated them, and made them fall senseless, when they were killed by ants. [Tavernier explains that the ants ate away their legs—thus accounting for the footlessness.]

It is to this nutmeg dissipation that Tom Moore alludes in Lalla Rookh:

The unromantic fact was that the natives of the Moluccas then, as now, after skilfully shooting with arrows or blow-guns and skinning the (male) birds, cut off the legs and dusky wings and folded the prepared skin about a stick run through the body and mouth, in which form “paradise-birds” continued to come to millinery markets in New York and London. A somewhat similar blunder in respect to swallows (or swifts?) has given us in the martlet, as a heraldic figure, a quaint perpetuation of an error in natural history. “Even at the present day,” remarks Fox Davies,^[111] speaking of England, “it is popularly believed that the swallow has no feet ... at any rate the heraldic swallow is never represented with feet, the legs terminating with the feathers that cover the shank.”

I do not know where Dryden got the information suggesting his comparison, in Threnodia Augustalis, “like birds of paradise that lived on mountain dew”; but the idea is as fanciful as the modern Malay fiction that this bird drops its egg, which bursts as it approaches the earth, releasing a fully developed young bird. Another account is that the hen lays her eggs on the back of her mate. Both theories are wild guesses in satisfaction of ignorance, for no one yet knows precisely the breeding-habits of these shy forest-birds, the females of which are rarely seen. Dryden may have read that in Mexico, as a Spanish traveller reported, hummingbirds live on dew; or he may have heard of the medieval notion that ravens were left to be nourished by the dews of heaven, and, with poetic license to disregard classification, transferred the feat to the fruit-eating birds of paradise.

Next comes that old yarn about geese that grow on trees. When or where it arose nobody knows, but somewhere in the Middle Ages, for Max MÜller quotes a cardinal of the 11th century who represented the goslings as bursting, fully fledged, from fruit resembling apples. A century later (1187) Giraldus Cambrensis, an archdeacon reproving laxity among the priests in Ireland, condemns the practice of eating barnacle geese in Lent on the plea that they are fish; and soon afterward Innocent III forbade it by decree. Queer variants soon appeared. A legend relating to Ireland inscribed on a Genoese world-map, and described by Dr. Edward L. Stevenson in a publication of The Hispanic Society (New York) reads: “Certain of their trees bear fruit which, decaying within, produces a worm which, as it subsequently develops, becomes hairy and feathered, and, provided wings, flies like a bird.”

An extensive clerical literature grew up in Europe in discussion of the ethics of this matter, for the monks liked good eating and their Lenten fare was miserably scanty, and a great variety of explanations of the alleged marine birth of these birds—ordinary geese (Branta bernicla) when mature—were contrived. That something of the kind was true nobody in authority denied down to the middle of the 17th century, when a German Jesuit, Gaspar Schott, was bold enough to declare that although the birth-place of this uncommon species of goose was unknown (it is now believed to breed in Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla), undoubtedly it was produced from incubated eggs like any other goose. Nevertheless the fable was reaffirmed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Scottish Royal Society for 1677. Henry Lee^[36] recalls two versions of the absurd but prevalent theory. One is that certain trees, resembling willows, and growing always close to the sea, produced at the ends of their branches fruits in the shape of apples, each containing the embryo of a goose, which, when the fruit was ripe, fell into the water and flew away. The other is that the geese were bred from a fungus growing on rotten timber floating at sea, and were first developed in the form of worms in the substance of the wood.

It is plain that this fable sprang from the similitude to the wings of tiny birds of the feathery arms that sessile barnacles reach out from their shells to clutch from the water their microscopic food, and also to the remote likeness the naked heads and necks of young birds bear to stalked or “whale” barnacles (Lepas). Both these cirripeds are found attached to floating wood, and sometimes to tree-branches exposed to waves and to high tides. The deception so agreeable to hungry churchmen was abetted by the etymologies in the older dictionaries. Dr. Murray, editor of The New Oxford Dictionary, asserts, however, that the origin of the word “barnacle” is not known, but that certainly it was applied to the mature goose before its was given to the cirriped.

Speaking of geese, what is the probable source of the warning “Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs” beyond or behind the obvious moral of Æsop’s familiar fable? The only light on the subject that has come to me is the following passage in Bayley’s^[24] somewhat esoteric book:

The Hindoos represent Brahma, the Breath of Life, as riding upon a goose, and the Egyptians symbolized Seb, the father of Osiris, as a goose.... According to the Hindoo theory of creation the Supreme Spirit laid a golden egg resplendent as the sun, and from the golden egg was born Brahma, the progenitor of the Universe. The Egyptians had a similar story, and described the sun as an egg laid by the primeval goose, in later times said to be a god. It is probable that our fairy tale of the goose that laid the golden egg is a relic of this very ancient mythology.

These notions in India probably were the seed of a Buddhist legend that comes a little nearer to our quest. According to this legend the Buddha (to be) was born a Brahmin, and after growing up was married and his wife bore him three daughters. After his death he was born again as a golden mallard (which is a duck), and determined to give his golden feathers one by one for the support of his former family. This beneficence went on, the mallard-Bodhisat helping at intervals by a gift of a feather. Then one day the mother proposed to pluck the bird clean, and, despite the protests of the daughters, did so. But at that instant the golden feathers ceased to be golden. His wings grew again, but they were plain white. It may be added that the Pali word for golden goose is hansa, whence the Latin anser, goose, German gans, the root, gan appearing in our words gander and gannet; so that it appears that the “mallard” was a goose, after all—and so was the woman!

This may not explain Æsop, for that fabulist told or wrote his moral anecdotes a thousand years before Buddhism was heard of; but it is permissible to suppose that so simple a lesson in bad management might have been taught in India ages before Æsop (several of whose fables have been found in early Egyptian papyri), and was only repeated, in a new dressing, by good Buddhists, as often happens with stories having a universal appeal to our sense of practical philosophy or of humor.

We have had occasion to speak of the eagle in many different aspects, as the elected king of the birds, as an emblem of empire, and so on, but there remain for use in this chapter some very curious attributes assigned to the great bird by ancient wonder-mongers that long ago would have been lost in the discarded rubbish of primitive ideas—mental toys of the childhood of the world—had they not been preserved for us in the undying pages of literature. Poetry, especially, is a sort of museum of antique inventions, preserving for us specimens—often without labels—of speculative stages in the early development of man’s comprehension of nature.

In the case of the eagle (as a genus, in the Old World not always clearly distinguished from vultures and the larger hawks) it is sometimes difficult to say whether some of its legendary aspects are causes or effects of others. Was its solar quality, for example, a cause or a consequence of its supposed royalty in the bird tribe? The predatory power, lofty flight, and haughty yet noble mien of the true eagle, may account for both facts, together or separately. It would be diving too deeply into the murky depths of mythology to show full proof, but it may be accepted that everywhere, at least in the East, the fountain of superstitions, the eagle typified the sun in its divine aspect. This appears as a long-accepted conception at the very dawn of history among the sun-worshippers of the Euphrates Valley, and it persisted in art and theology until Christianity remodelled such “heathen” notions to suit the new trend of religious thought, and transformed the “bird of fire” into a symbol of the Omnipotent Spirit—an ascription which artists interpreted very liberally.

In Egypt a falcon replaced it in its religious significance, true eagles being rare along the Nile, and “eagle-hawks” were kept in the sun-gods’ temples, sacred to Horus (represented with a hawk-head surmounted by a sun-disk), Ra, Osiris, Seku, and other solar divinities. “It was regarded,” as Mr. Cook explains in Zeus,^[37] “as the only bird that could look with unflinching gaze at the sun, being itself filled with sunlight, and eventually akin to fire.” Later, people made it the sacred bird of Apollo, and Mithraic worshippers spoke of Helios as a hawk, but crude superstitions among the populace were mixed with this priestly reverence.

It was universally believed of the eagle, that, as an old writer said, “she can see into the great glowing sun”; few if any were aware that she could veil her eyes by drawing across the orbs that third eyelid which naturalists term the nictitating membrane. Hence arose that further belief, lasting well into the Middle Ages, that the mother-bird proved her young by forcing them to gaze upon the sun, and discarding those who shrank from the fiery test—“Like Eaglets bred to Soar, Gazing on Starrs at heaven’s mysterious Pow’r,” wrote an anonymous poet in 1652. “Before that her little ones be feathered,” in the words of an old compiler of marvels quoted by Hulme,^[38] “she will beat and strike them with her wings, and thereby force them to looke full against the sunbeams. Now if she sees any one of them to winke, or their eies to water at the raies of the sunne, she turns it with the head foremost out of the nest as a bastard.”

How many who now read the 103d Psalm, or that fine figure of rhetoric in Milton’s Areopagitica, could explain the full meaning of the comparison used? The passage referred to is that in which Milton exclaims: “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep.... Methinks I see her renewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the sun.” Milton evidently expected all his readers to appreciate the value of his simile—to know that eagles were credited with just this power of juvenescence. “When,” in the words of an even older chronicler, “an eagle hathe darkness and dimness in een, and heavinesse in wings, against this disadvantage she is taught by kinde to seek a well of springing water, and then she flieth up into the aire as far as she may, till she be full hot by heat of the air and by travaille of flight, and so then by heat the pores being opened, and the feathers chafed, and she falleth sideingly into the well, and there the feathers be chaunged and the dimness of her een is wiped away and purged, and she taketh again her might and strength.” Isn’t that a finely constructed tale? Spencer thought so when he wrote:

Margaret C. Walker^[39] elaborates the legend in her excellent book, suggesting that it may have originated in contemplation of the great age to which eagles are supposed to live; but to my mind it grew out of the ancient symbolism that made the eagle represent the sun, which plunges into the western ocean every night, and rises, its youth renewed every morning.

“It is related,” says Miss Walker, “that when this bird feels the season of youth is passing by, and when his young are still in the nest, he leaves the aging earth and soars toward the sun, the consumer of all that is harmful. Mounting upward to the third region of the air—the region of meteors—he circles and swings about under the great fiery ball in their midst, turning every feather to its scorching rays, then, with wings drawn back, like a meteor himself, he drops into some cold spring or into the ocean wave there to have the heat driven inward by the soul-searching chill of its waters. Then flying to his eyrie he nestles among his warm fledglings, till, starting into perspiration, he throws off his age with his feathers. That his rejuvenescence may be complete, as his sustenance must be of youth, he makes prey of his young, feeding on the nestlings that have warmed him. He is clothed anew and youth is again his.”

Cruden’s Concordance^[51] to the Bible, first published in 1737, contains under “Eagle” a fine lot of old Semitic misinformation as to the habits of eagles, which Cruden gives his clerical readers apparently in complete faith and as profitable explanations of the biblical passages in which that bird is mentioned. Allow me to quote some of these as an addition to our collection, for I find them retained without comment in the latest edition of this otherwise admirable work:

It is said that when an eagle sees its young ones so well-grown, as to venture upon flying, it hovers over their nest, flutters with its wings, and excites them to imitate it, and take their flight, and when it sees them weary or fearful it takes them upon its back, and carries them so, that the fowlers cannot hurt the young without piercing through the body of the old one.... It is of great courage, so as to set on harts and great beasts. And has no less subtility in taking them; for having filled its wings with sand and dust, it sitteth on their horns, and by its wings shaketh it in their eyes, whereby they become an easy prey.... It goeth forth to prey about noon, when men are gone home from the fields.

It hath a little eye, but a very quick sight, and discerns its prey afar off, and beholds the sun with open eyes. Such of her young as through weakness of sight cannot behold the sun, it rejects as unnatural. It liveth long, nor dieth of age or sickness, say some, but of hunger, for by age its bill grows so hooked that it cannot feed.... It is said that it preserves its nest from poison, by having therein a precious stone, named Aetites (without which it is thought the eagle cannot lay her eggs ...) and keepeth it clean by the frequent use of the herb maidenhair. Unless it be very hungry it devoureth not whole prey, but leaveth part of it for other birds, which follow. Its feathers, or quills, are said to consume other quills that lie near them. Between the eagle and dragon there is constant enmity, the eagle seeking to kill it, and the dragon breaks all the eagle’s eggs it can find.

If the Jewish eagles are as smart as that, my sympathies are with the dragon!

The relations between Zeus, or Jupiter, and the eagle, mostly reprehensible, belong to classic mythology; and they have left little trace in folklore, which, be it remembered, takes account of living or supposed realities, not of mythical creatures. The most notable bit, perhaps, is the widely accepted notion that this bird is never killed by lightning; is “secure from thunder and unharmed by Jove,” as Dryden phrases it. Certain common poetic allusions explain themselves, for instance, that in The Myrmidons of Æschylus:

These little narratives, which are certainly interesting if true—as they are not—are good examples of the failure to exercise what may be called the common-sense of science.

Extraordinary indeed are the foolish things that used to be told of birds by men apparently wise and observant in other, even kindred, matters. Isaak Walton,^[40] for example, so well informed as to fish, seemed to swallow falsities about other animals as readily as did the gudgeon Isaak’s bait. He writes in one place, after quoting some very mistaken remarks about grasshoppers, that “this may be believed if we consider that when the raven hath hatched her eggs she takes no further care, but leaves her young ones to the care of the God of Nature, who is said in the Psalms ‘to feed the young that call upon him.’ And they be kept alive, and fed by a dew, or worms that breed in their nests, or some other ways that we mortals know not.”

The origin of this is plain. The ancient Jews told one another that ravens left their fledglings to survive by chance, not feeding them as other birds did. This is manifested in several places in the Bible, as in the 147th Psalm: “He giveth to the beast his food and to the young ravens which cry”; but this absurd notion is far older, no doubt, than the Psalms. Aristotle^[41] mentions that in Scythia—a terra incognita where, in the minds of the Greeks, anything might happen—“there is a kind of bird as big as a bustard, which ... does not sit upon its eggs, but hides them in the skin of a hare or fox,” and then watches them from a neighboring perch. Readers may guess at the reality, if any, behind this. Aristotle seems to have accepted it as a fact, for he goes on to describe how certain birds of prey are equally devoid of parental sense of duty; but we cannot be sure what species are referred to, despite the names used in Cresswell’s translation of the History of Animals, as follows:

The bird called asprey ... feeds both its young and those of the eagle ... for the eagle turns out its young ... before the proper time, when they still require feeding and are unable to fly. The eagle appears to eject its young from the nest from envy ... and strikes them. When they are turned out they begin to scream, and the phene comes and takes them up.

Why so strange notions of maternal care in birds should ever have gained credence in the face of daily observation of the solicitude of every creature for its young, is one of the puzzles of history, but that they were widespread is certain, and also that they persisted in folklore down to the time when, at the dawn of the Renaissance, observation and research began to replace blind confidence in ancient lore. Thus J. E. Harting,^[42] in his well-known treatise on the natural history in Shakespeare, quotes from a Latin folio of 1582 in support of his statement that “it was certainly a current belief in olden times that when the raven saw its young newly hatched, and covered with down, it conceived such an aversion that it forsook them, and did not return to its nest until a darker plumage showed itself.”

Ravens have quite enough sins to answer for and calumnies to live down without adding to the list this murderous absurdity, contrary to the very first law of bird-nature. Nevertheless the poets, as usual, take advantage of the thought (for its moral picturesqueness, I suppose), as witness Burns’s lines in The Cotter’s Saturday Night—

It is plain that the plowman-poet was too canny to believe it, but perhaps it is well to say that there is no foundation in fact for this extraordinary charge. Ravens are faithful and careful parents: in fact Shakespeare makes a character in Titus Andronicus mention that “some say that ravens foster forlorn children,” a view quite the opposite of the other.

Another calumny is thoughtlessly repeated by Brewer^[34] in his widely used reference-book Phrase and Fable (which unfortunately is far from trustworthy in the department of natural history) when he records: “Ravens by their acute sense of smell, discern the savor of dying bodies, and under the hope of preying on them, light on chimney-tops or flutter about sick-rooms.”

The correction to be made here is not to the gruesome superstition but to the asserted keenness of the bird’s sense of smell. The gathering of vultures to a dead animal is not by its odor, but by the sight of the carcass by one, and the noting of signs of that fact by others, who hasten to investigate the matter. Oliver Goldsmith^[32] fell into the same error when he wrote of the protective value, as he esteemed it, of this sense in birds in general, “against their insidious enemies”; and cited the practice of decoymen, formerly so numerous as wildfowl trappers in the east of England, “who burn turf to hide their scent from the ducks.” The precaution was wasted, for none of the senses in birds is so little developed or of so small use as the olfactory. Goldsmith’s Animated Nature was, a century ago, the fountain of almost all popular knowledge of natural history among English-reading people, and was often reprinted. As a whole it was a good and useful book, but its accomplished author was not a trained naturalist, and absorbed some statements that were far from authentic—perhaps in some cases he was so pleased with the narrative that he was not sufficiently critical of its substance, as in the story of the storks in Smyrna:

The inhabitants amuse themselves by taking away some of the storks’ eggs from the nests on their roofs, and replacing them with fowls’ eggs. “When the young are hatched the sagacious male bird discovers the difference of these from their own brood and sets up a hideous screaming, which excites the attention of the neighboring storks, which fly to his nest. Seeing the cause of their neighbor’s uneasiness, they simultaneously commence pecking the hen, and soon deprive her of life, supposing these spurious young ones to be the produce of her conjugal infidelity. The male bird in the meantime appears melancholy, though he seems to conceive she justly merited her fate.”

In Goldsmith’s day such contributions to foreign zoology were common. Even the so-called scientific men of early Renaissance times indulged in the story-teller’s joy. Albertus Magnus asserted that the sea-eagle and the osprey swam with one foot, which was webbed, and captured prey with the other that was armed with talons. Aldrovandus backed him up, and everybody accepted the statement until LinnÆus laughed them out of it by the simple process of examining the birds. These, you may protest, are not mistakes but pure fancies; yet it is only a short step from them to the romance, hardly yet under popular doubt, that the albatross broods its eggs in a raftlike, floating nest and sleeps on the wing, as you may read in Lalla Rookh:

Even more poetic is the tale of the death-chant of the swan, still more than half-believed by most folks, for we constantly use it as a figure of speech, describing in a word, for example, the final protest of a discarded office-seeker as his “swan-song.” It is useless to hunt for the origin of this notion—it was current at any rate in Aristotle’s time, for he writes: “Swans have the power of song, especially when near the end of their life, and some persons, sailing near the coast of Libya, have met many of them in the sea singing a mournful song and have afterwards seen some of them die.” Pliny, Ælian (who called Greece “mother of lies”), Pausanias and other more recent philosophers, denied that there was any truth in this statement; but the sentimental public, charmed by the pathos of the picture presented to their imaginations, and refusing to believe that in reality this bird’s only utterance is a whoop, or a trumpet-like note, have kept it alive aided by the poets who have found it a useful fancy—for example Byron, who moans

The poets are not to be quarrelled with too severely on this account. It must be conceded that our literature would have been considerably poorer had poets declined to accept all that travellers and country folk told them. Chaucer uses the “swan-song,” and Shakespeare often alludes to it, as in Othello:

Even Tennyson has a poem on it, picturing a scene of the most charming nature, the pensive beauty of which is vastly enhanced by the bold use of the fable.

It has required both the hard scientific scrutiny of the past century and a wide scattering of geographical information, to offset in the minds of most of us the tendency to imagine that “over the hills and far away” things somehow are picturesquely different from those in our own humdrum neighborhood, and that perhaps yonder the laws of nature, so inexorable here, may admit now and then of exceptions. Amber came from—well, few persons knew precisely whence; and wasn’t it possible that it might be a concretion of birds’ tears, as some said?

sang an enamored poet.

Facilis descensus Averni is a Latin phrase in constant use, with the implication that it is difficult to get back—sed revocare gradus, that’s the rub! But how many know that this dark little cliff-ringed lake near Cumae, in Italy, was anciently so named in the belief that because of its noxious vapors no bird could fly across it without being suffocated. Hence a myth placed there an entrance to the nether world, and, with keen business instincts, the Cumaean sybil intensified her reputation as a seer by taking as her residence a grotto near this baleful bit of water.

Who can forget the monumental mistake of that really great and philosophic naturalist, Buffon, in denying that the voices of American birds were, or could be, melodious. He said of our exquisite songster, the wood-thrush, that it represented the song-thrush of Europe which had at sometime rambled around by the Northern Ocean and made its way into America; and that it had there, owing to a change of food and climate, so degenerated that its cry was now harsh and unpleasant, “as are the cries of all birds that live in wild countries inhabited by savages.” The danger of error in drawing inferences as to purpose in nature is great in any case; but it is doubly so when the philosopher is mistaken as to his supposed facts.

By going back a few decades one might find examples of more or less amusing errors in natural history to the point of weariness, but with one or two illustrations from The Young Ladies’ Book (Boston, 1836), I will bring this chapter to its end. This little volume, doubtless English in origin, was intended for the entertaining instruction of school-girls, and in many respects was excellent, but when it ventured on American ornithology it put some amusing misinformation into its readers’ minds. It teaches them that our butcherbirds “bait thorns with grasshoppers to decoy the lesser insectivorous birds into situations where they may easily be seized”—a beautiful sample of teleological assumption of motive based on the fact that the shrike sometimes impales dead grasshoppers, mice and so forth on thorns or fence-splinters, having learned apparently that that is a good way to hold its prey (its feet are weak, and unprovided with talons) while it tears away mouthfuls of flesh. Often the victim is left there, only partly eaten, or perhaps untorn; and rarely, if ever, does the shrike return to it, and certainly it attracts no “lesser insectivorous” birds nor any other kind.

The author also instructs his young ladies that “the great American bittern has the property of emitting a light from its breast,” and so forth. His authority for this long-persistent and picturesque untruth was a review of Wilson’s American Ornithology in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History (London, Vol. vi., 835.) Speaking of this familiar marsh-bird, which, let me repeat, has no such aid in making a living, or need of it, as it is not nocturnal in its habits, the anonymous reviewer writes:

It is called by Wilson the great American bittern, but, what is very extraordinary, he omits to mention that it has the power of emitting a light from its breast, equal to the light of a common torch, which illuminates the water so as to enable it to discover its prey.... I took some trouble to ascertain the truth of this, which has been confirmed to me by several gentlemen of undoubted veracity, and especially by Mr. Franklin Peale, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Museum.

A similar belief existed in the past in regard to the osprey, which we in the United States call the fish-hawk. Loskiel (Mission to the Indians, 1794) records it thus: “They say that when it [the fish-hawk] hovers over the water, it possesses a power of alluring the fish toward the surface, by means of an oily substance contained in its body. So much is certain, that, if a bait is touched with this oil, the fish bite so greedily, that it appears as if it were impossible for them to resist.” How much of this is native American, and how much is imported it is hard to determine now.