not commonly seen. By report he is as big as an eagle; for color, as yellow and bright as gold (namely, all about the neck) the rest of the body a deep red purple; the tail azure blue, intermingled with feathers among of rose carnation color; and the head bravely adorned with a crest and pennach finely wrought; having a tuft and plume thereupon, right fair and goodly to be seen. Manilius, the noble Roman senator, right excellently seen in the best kind of learning and literature, and yet never taught by any, was the first man of the long Robe, who wrote of this bird at large and most exquisitely. He reporteth, that never man was known to see him feeding; that in Arabia he is held a sacred bird, dedicated unto the sun; that he liveth six hundred and sixty years; and when he groweth old, and begins to decay, he builds himself with the branches and twigs of the Cannell or cinnamon, and Frankincense trees; and when he hath filled it with all sorts of aromatical spices, he yieldeth up his life there

upon.

"He saith, moreover, that of his bones and marrow there breeds at first as it were a little worm: which afterward proveth to be a pretty bird. And the first thing this new Phoenix does, is to perform the obsequies of the former Phoenix late deceased: to translate and carry away his whole nest into the city of the Sun near Panchea, and to bestow it full devoutly there upon the altar. The same Manilius affirmeth that the revolution of the great year so much spoken of, agreeth just with the life of this bird; in which year the stars return again to their first points, and give significations of times and seasons, as at the beginning and withall, that this year should begin at high noon that very day when the sun entereth the sign Aries.

And by his saying, the year of that revolution was by him showed, when P. Lincinius and M. Cornelius were consuls, Cornelius Valerianus writeth, that whiles Q. Plautius and Sex. Papinius were consuls, the Phoenix flew into Egypt. Brought he was hither also to Rome in that time that Claudius Cæsar was Censor, to wit, in the eight hundredth year from the foundation of Rome, and showed openly to be seen in a full and general assembly of the people, as appeared upon the public records: howbeit, no man ever made any doubt, but he was a counterfeit Phonix, and no better."

He wrote of the bird "Incendiaria," that it was "unlucky as our Chronicles and Annals do witness, in regard of her the city of Rome many a time hath made solemn supplications to pacify the Gods, and to avert their displeasure by her portend." A sentence further he wrote: "But what this bird should be, neither do I know, nor yet find in any writer. Some give this interpretation of Incendiaria, to be any bird whatsoever, that hath been seen carrying fire either from altar or chapel of the Gods. But hitherto I have not found any man who would say directly that he knew what this bird should be." This is not in the least surprising. He quoted Nigidius concerning a bird "called Subis, which used to squash eagle's eggs."

He described a number of other fabled birds, and attached all the current superstition to the history of each, even to the account of the barnyard fowl that spoke. But, as almost all of the birds described are among the list of Bible birds, what is said of them by pagan writers will compare much better if used in the chapter containing the Bible records of the same subject.

Aelian, of Italy, published a rather miscellaneous account of birds and animals 140 A. D., and in 1228 A. D. Albertus Magnus followed with twenty-six volumes, most of which are compilations from Pliny and Aristotle. Belon, Aldrovardus, Willoughby, Ray, and several others followed. Then there came the real founder of ornithology on a scientific basis, the man whose classification of half the important species remains unchanged to-day— Linnæus. His works were published in 1740 A. D., and many revisions have been made. From them down to our time the history of ornithology is well known.

From this brief resume it must be seen that the historians of the Bible wrote from their personal knowledge of their subjects, and that they knew the birds quite as well, and treated of them much more sanely and comprehensively than their contemporaries of other countries, or their followers centuries later. Moses spoke in certain. tones, and while we now know that several of the birds he set aside as unclean, according to our first translations, were regarded as great delicacies by the people of other nations at the same time,—as a whole, we easily can recognize our birds of the same species to-day in what he wrote of his.

Nothing gives greater emphasis to the important place birds always have occupied in history than the fact that one of the oldest pictures in the world has birds as its subject. It is a fragment of a fresco taken from a tomb at Maydoon, and now in the museum at Cairo. This picture was painted three thousand years before Christ and near two thousand years before the time of Moses. Six geese are represented, four of which are so accurately done, and in all those cycles the change in species is so