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 Phoenix, 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 A.D. 140, and in A.D. 1228 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 A.D. 1740, and many revisions have been made. From them down to our time the history of ornithology is well known.

From this brief résume 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 small, that they readily can be classified as the ancestors of two species known to-day.

Later the paintings, frescoes, and sculptures of Egypt and Assyria were filled with bird figures, but the work was so poorly done, or else the birds so stiffly conventionalized, that it is a difficult matter to decide whether they are eagles, hawks, or vultures. All of these abounded, and well might have been used in symbol writing to portray strength, endurance, penetration, or rapacity.

Artists of to-day are setting ornithologists the same

study. They attempt to illustrate articles with drawings of birds, without having seen a naked and ofttimes no living bird of the species, and so proper contour is lost. Knowing absolutely nothing of anatomy, habits, or characteristics, they attempt to reproduce birds and make amazing caricatures. In the first place, many artists go to museums and draw from a dried skin stretched over a wire frame and stuffed. They might equally as well attempt to use mummies as subjects from which to reproduce living men; for it is quite as lifelike to be shrivelled as abnormally rounded out. If one of these men ever does go to a zoological garden and attempt the poor substitute of a confined bird to illustrate the pose and characteristics of a free one, he begins to draw in ignorance of the first great principle of feathering. There are hills and hollows, and a great deal of shape to the anatomy of a bird. One only has to pick up and examine any plucked fowl in the market-place to see that it did not have feathers all over it, and that what it had were of different sizes, and set closely in some places, wide apart in others. Utterly oblivious of these facts, books and periodicals are filled with birds feathered all over equally, and almost as round as a ball in shape. The only bird pictures ever made with accuracy were done with a camera, which truly reproduces life.

The records of Moses began four thousand years before Christ, and in our day nineteen hundred and nine years afterward-five thousand nine hundred and nine years in all-there is no very great change in the hawk, the eagle, and the vulture. This leads us to wonder how many years before the time of Moses it was that there were birds with twenty vertebræ in their tails and sixteen teeth in their jaws; and how many years previous to that the first serpent, from which all birds are descended, crept from the water and began life upon land and among the trees. Has any one rightly reckoned the age of the earth?

Much has been written concerning the Mistakes of Moses. If that title had been the Mistakes of Habakkuk or Job it would have attracted less attention. There is so much in striking alliteration. I have found several

mistakes I shall mention as they occur in the ornithology of the great law-giver, but I discovered one to overshadow them completely in the writings of one of the best-informed ornithologists that ever lived the author of a dictionary of birds, not a pioneer, but a man of our time having access to everything produced to the present day. He writes that it is his opinion that "white geese were produced by the wicked and inhuman practice of plucking feathers from grey geese while alive, for pillows." He explains that a dark feather prematurely pulled from a bird comes back white. If white geese originated in "the wicked and inhuman practice of plucking grey ones alive," I want to know who plucked the blue herons, brown owls, and grey gulls to produce these white species. Also, who plucked the black bear, red foxes, and grey rabbits to produce white species among mammals?

The Mistakes of Moses do not appear nearly so great or so numerous as one would expect from the title. They look so very small when compared with those of writers who have had the benefit of centuries more of enlightenment than he. Then, too, it must be remembered that Moses has been translated, revised, and re-edited many times without his knowledge or consent. The beauty of the work of any writer is inevitably marred in translation to another language. A whole English sentence is required to express a thought covered by one small Hebrew word. The point I wish to make was forcefully expressed centuries ago by the grandson of Jesus, the son of Sirach, in a preface to his translation of the book of Ecclesiasticus, now incorporated in many modern Bibles. "For things originally spoken in the Hebrew have not the same force in them when they are translated into another tongue; and not only these, but the law itself, and the prophecies, and the rest of the books, have no small difference when they are spoken in their original language."

The greatest difference that I can see between Moses and the scientist is that there is a time when science comes to a dead stop.

It has its theories, but they all end when they reach the origin of matter and life. An ably written article on

Panspermy, just published as I write, closes with these words: "Even as of the billions of pollen grains that may be wafted by the wind over the meadows of the earth only one may germinate and flourish into a tree, so of the incalculable germs with which each living world prodigally sows the unfathomable depths of space, only a single spore may swim into the embrace of a fallow world.

"The impression to be drawn from this beautiful conception of the transmission of life from star to star is that of the unity of all living creatures. Granted that the universe is studded with planets in all stages of evolution, from gaseous incandescence to ripe and dying spheres, organic life must be as eternal as matter and energy. Somewhere a world is always waiting for a primal, living unit. Life has ever existed and will ever exist. Whence sprang that first germ which fertilized the first cold planet, we shall never know. We have long since abandoned all search for the origin of energy; so must we abandon the hopeless task of tracing to its source the river of universal life."

That is always the end of all scientific investigation. When at last it reaches the hearts of the things we want to know, how matter and life originated, it comes to a granite wall. A wall so long no one ever can go around it, so high no one can surmount it, so thick it is impenetrable, and there science may search, climb, and batter until it is worn out, but the answer never comes. Here it is worlds of satisfaction to have Moses intervene and say, "God created."

We love to believe that He did, because such belief throws us upon instinctive impulse. For there is an instinct in all men, an inborn impulse to mate, to build shelter, to fight for supremacy, to make music, to dance, and to worship. In his hour of dire extremity the most hardened man startles at the sound of his own voice imploring God for help. He cannot save himself, therefore he cries into space for rescue by the Unseen.

This impulse to worship is not found in civilized nations alone, it is a universal thing. No savage band ever has been discovered so benighted that it did not worship