AN ORNITHOLOGICAL COMEDY OF ERRORS
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:
Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks?
Or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?
Which leaveth her eggs in the earth,
And warmeth them in the dust,
And forgetteth that the foot may crush them,
Or that the wild beast may break them?
She is hardened against her young ones
As though they were not hers:
Because God hath deprived her of wisdom,
Neither hath he imparted to her understanding.
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_:
With such a look as fables say
The mother ostrich fixes on her eggs,
Till that intense affection
Kindle its light of life.
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 Phœnicia 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
The estryge that wyll eate
An horshowe so great
In the stede of meate
Such feruent heat
His stomake doth freat [fret].
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_:
By them there sat the loving pellican
Whose young ones, poison’d by the serpent’s sting,
With her own blood again to life doth bring.
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_ (τροχίλος), 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
τροχίλος for ’ορχίλος, 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 puny bird that dares with pleasing hum
Within the crocodile’s stretched jaws to come.
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_:
Those golden birds that in the spice time drop
About the gardens, drunk with that sweet fruit
Whose scent has lured them o’er the summer flood.
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:
As eagle fresh out of the ocean wave,
Where he hath left his plumes, all hoary gray,
And decks himself with feathers, youthful, gay.
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:
So, in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
‘With our own feathers, not by others’ hands
‘Are we now smitten.’
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_—
That he who stills the raven’s clamorous nest
· · · · ·
Would in the way his wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide.
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_:
While on a peak that braved the sky
A ruined temple tower’d so high
That oft the sleeping albatross
Struck the wild ruins with her wing,
And from her cloud-rocked slumbering
Started, to find man’s dwelling there
In her own fields of silent air.
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
Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
Where nothing save the waves and I
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
There, swan-like, let me sing and die.
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_:
I will play the swan and die in music.
A swan-like end, fading in music.
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?
Around thee shall glisten the loveliest amber
That ever the sorrowing sea-bird hath wept—
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.