tion of the Bible wrote from their personal knowledge and the traditions of their ancestors. They had no authorities to whom to refer, at least they do not mention any, as do the writers of their time in Greece and Italy. Aristotle lived over a thousand years after the time of Moses, and wrote the first preserved records of bird life. He mentioned predecessors, who may have been contemporaneous with Moses; but their work was lost, and as it was done in another country and another language, there was not even a slight chance that Bible writers had any benefit from it. So that the birds mentioned in the Bible, and the history of their habits and characteristics, which is mostly used as the basis of comparisons of bird life with man, form our very earliest records.

Moses first wrote of the birds when he specified those which were not to be used for food, while compiling the laws to govern the Hebrews after they had reached the Promised Land. As a rule, it is easy to see why he so emphatically declared certain birds an "abomination." There was a good natural history reason, especially as the list stands in the latest and most scholarly translations. Other Bible writers accepted these laws of Moses, and what they had to say of birds was more in the way of comparing the processes of bird life with man. Solomon recorded that he "spake three thousand proverbs, and his songs were one thousand five. And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts and of fowl, and of creeping things and of fishes."

Job, in replying to friends who brought him such dubious comfort at the time of his afflictions, continued that poetical strain in which his whole book is couched

when he turned to nature for a comparison. He proved that he had learned great lessons all around him, and was capable of speaking of what he learned comprehensively.

"But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; And the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee;

Or, speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee;

Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord

hath wrought this?

In whose hand is the soul of every living thing,

And the breath of all mankind."

It was Job who indicated that, although chickens were unknown in his time, people were eating the eggs of fowls of some species when he asked:

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I Can that which hath no savor be eaten without salt?

Or is there any taste in the white of an egg?"

King David, who said of himself, "My tongue is the pen of a ready writer," unhesitatingly declared:

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I know all the fowls of the mountains:

And the wild beasts of the field are mine."

It was David who, in writing of the goodness of the Almighty to the Israelites, recorded that

"He rained flesh upon them also as dust,

And feathered fowls like as the sand of the sea."

Birds were so plentiful that the Creator enumerated "the fowls of the air" as one of the methods of destruction which should fall upon the Jews: and the son of Sirach wrote in Ecclesiasticus, "As birds flying down he sprinkleth the snow."

People were accustomed to seeing large flocks in migration. The birds of interior Africa came up to Bible lands, and those found there crossed the Mediterranean, each returning when driven by changes of season. Jeremiah proved that people of his time knew the birds, and spoke of them casually, just as we do, by recording that "The stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming."

It must have been the remembrance of myriads of birds, massed in migration, which was in the mind of Isaiah when he wrote that beautiful and poetic line, "As birds flying, so will the Lord of Hosts defend Jerusalem." He had seen clouds of birds sweeping the night sky to seek the land in which they homed, and he thought that, like them, the Almighty would fly to the defense of the loved city.

But when the people had sinned, and the Creator was provoked to anger, He warned them that He would destroy Judah and Jerusalem, and give the carcasses of the inhabitants to "the fowls of the heaven." In prophesying the doom of Ethiopia, He called upon the birds to take part in its destruction. "For thus hath the Lord said unto me, I will be still, and I will behold in my dwelling place; like clear heat in the sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest, when the blossom is over, and the flower becometh a ripening grape, He shall cut off the sprigs with pruning hooks, and the spreading branches shall He take away and cut down. They shall be left together unto the ravenous birds of the mountains: and the beasts of the earth: and the ravenous birds shall summer upon them, and the beasts of the earth shall