those which he saw in the Holy Land, though he noticed the nightingale amid the willows of Jordan and the olive trees of Judea; but neither did he see the cuckoo in Egypt, whence Professor Temminck received it; and it is so widely spread, that there is no reason for supposing that it is excluded from Syria. It is well known in the Morea and the Grecian Archipelago, whence it departs for Africa with the turtle-dove, and is, in consequence, called turtle-leader. The turtle dove is named in Scripture again and again. The beautiful passage in the Song of Solomon will occur to every one "11. For lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. "12. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land. "13. The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away!" And Hasselquist saw the turtle (Columba Turtur) in the Holy Land. Mr. Strickland noticed the cuckoo at Smyrna, and Mr. Dickson and Mr. Ross sent specimens of it from Erzeroum to the Zoological Society of London. It is spread over a great part of Asia, and has been found in Japan and Java. The disputed word, it will be observed, stands between the night-crow or night-hawk, and the hawk, the owl being antecedent to the night-hawk in this catalogue of unclean birds. Now it was one of the old legends that the cuckoo, at a certain period, was turned into a hawk; and the evidence generally appears to be in favour of the version at present in use. If we turn from sacred to profane story, we shall find that the cuckoo bore no common part in ancient fable. The king and father of Gods and men himself did not disdain to take the form of the bird when he was anxious to introduce himself to Juno. It is well known how compendiously Saturn provided for his family; and the future Queen of Heaven seems to have very nearly shared the fate of her brothers and sisters. She was, however, restored to the world by means of a potion given to her ogre of a papa, in order to make him give up the indigestible stone which his betterhalf had induced him to swallow instead of Jupiter. Poor blooming Juno was separated from the rest of the heavenly conclave, and wandering to Mount Thornax in Argolis, there remained in solitude. Jupiter, who was on the watch, raised the most pelting of pitiless storms, and, in the likeness of a cuckoo, flew all trembling and shivering from the bitter weather to Juno's lap for shelter. The kind-hearted goddess pitying the bird's condition, covered him with her robe. In an instant the bird was gone, and the god resumed his shape. The sudden transformation, startling as it was, did not throw the prudent young lady off her guard, and they were afterwards married in due form. : But there is always somebody ready to give an ill-natured turn to a story accordingly the gossip ran, that when the drenched bird flew to her for refuge, she shook it out of her peplum; but when the god stood confessed, she accepted him. However this may have been, never was such a wedding as they had. Gods, man and womankind, beasts, and all creation attended at the solemnization of the nuptials, with one exception. Chelone plumply refused to come, and treated the whole affair with ridicule and contempt. Poor young lady—the world was in its infancy then, or she would have known better than to contemn the powerful, and would have escaped from figuring as a terrible example to posterity. Mercury just looked in, waved his caduceus over her, and down sank the shapely maiden, "As tall and as straight as the popular Tree," into a tortoise. This was not pleasant, but worse remained behind; for she was condemned to perpetual silence, and, in her new form, became the symbol of that unfeminine accomplishment. If anybody should be hardy enough to doubt all this, we would merely observe, that the mountain, after Jove's transformation, received the name of Coccyx or Coccygia, being no longer known as Thornax; and that the Argives especially worshipped the goddess, whose statue, seated on a throne, held a sceptre, upon the top of which a cuckoo was seated. This elevation does not seem to have been lost sight of by the cuckoo, who began to think himself a very great bird; and in his pride of place, challenged the nightingale one fine April evening, to a trial of song. The difficulty was to find a good judge; but at last it was sagely remarked by an owl, that as the contention resolved itself into a question of sounds, the creature with the longest ears would best become the bench upon the occasion, and the animal appointed to keep down the growth of thistles took his seat accordingly. The cuckoo began and went on cuckoo," "cuckoo," for half-an-hour, during which the judge was observed to prick up his long ears with a knowing air, to be equalled only by Harley when he enacts the translated Bottom. 66 As soon as his antagonist had finished, the nightingale poured forth "With fast, thick warble his delicious notes, As he were fearful that an April night The judge had been nid-nid-nodding after the third or fourth strain, and when the song was ended, he was awakened by a hoot from the owl, who was somewhat scandalized by his dropping asleep, though she did not wonder at it, and had hardly been able to keep her own eyes open. He gravely observed, that the nightingale's voice was very loud, and that his song might be very fine for anything he knew; but he, for one, did not understand it, and he should be glad to hear who did. No answer being given beyond a hum of applause from his auditory, his worship decided in favour of the cuckoo. The nightingale, who thought this rather hard, lodged an appeal to Man, after a sneer or two from the president, and, to the astonishment of his absolute wisdom, his judgment was reversed. This was before the time of Midas, and the decision of the court below was, no doubt, the case relied upon by that Justice for his judgment in the celebrated suit of Pan against Apollo. Nor did the cuckoo fail to figure in the ancient pharmacopoeia. Pliny tells us, that if it be wrapped in a hare-skin and applied to the patient, it will produce sleep, and Rodeletius notices its ashes as good against disorders of the stomach. A somewhat unsavoury decoction, into the ingredients of which we will not now enter, but which could be procured only from the cuckoo, was held to be a specific against the bite of a mad dog; and, according to the Roman zoologist, the very sound of its voice, when assisted by due ceremonies, produced a degree of domestic comfort, which, if the ancient Italians were as much subject to pulicial persecution as the moderns, must have been quite invaluable: that they were not spared the company of the indefatigable insect voltigeurs, any more than their descendants, is rendered highly probable by their lack of linen. If, when the bird was first heard, the auditor circumscribed his right-foot, and dug up the earth on which it rested, not a flea would be hatched wherever that earth was scattered.† Nor did the ancient kitchens disdain it. On the contrary, Aristotle states, that cuckoos are fattest and most highly-flavoured about the time of their laying:‡ and Pliny declares that no bird can compete with a young cuckoo, just able to fly, in the sweetness of its flesh. Aldrovandus remarks, that the Italians still bring it to their tables; but that the Germans reject it with loathing as an unclean bird, on account of its habit of spitting, to the consideration of which charge we now proceed. The country people and their children still give the name of "cuckoo-spittle" to the frothy nidus of Tettigonia spumaria, which * Natural History, xxI. 15. + Nat. Hist. xxx. 10. | Ib. x. 9. every one almost must have observed on plants in the spring. The worst that now comes of this fable now is, that when the children surround a plant so embossed, one older and more learned than the rest will clear away the froth to show the admiring minors the inmate, gravely assuring them that it will be a cuckoo! But, no very long time ago, this "cuckoo-spittle" had a very bad name, and constituted under the name of " witchesbutter," one of the proofs, as the sages of the church and the law then pronounced such absurdities to be, that consigned numbers of women and children to the last penalties of the law at Mohra, in Sweden, in the year 1670. These unfortunates were better known as "The Witches of Blockula," that being the place of the infernal meeting, as was also proved, to which the women and children aforesaid rode in the dead of night upon men, and when they came to Blockula the men were left reared against the wall asleep. But, besides this human conveyance, they bestrode posts and goats, the backs of the latter being elongated by an ingenious device for which we refer the curious to the trial. Nothing stopped them they flew through chimneys and windows, and never broke a pane nor displaced a brick. Scenes were given in evidence as having occurred at their diabolical festival, such as cannot be written, but we may notice an infernal coup d'état, whereby the Prince of Darkness tested the fidelity of his followers by giving out that he was dead; whereat there was great lamentation. Some of these crack-brained women and children, worn out, no doubt, by the cruel and abominable means then put in force for the purpose, confessed among other things, that they had two spirits, one like a raven, the other like a cat, and that these spirits fetched them home butter, and cheese, and bacon, and all sorts of grain, and milk, and that sometimes these carriers filled themselves so full, that they disgorged part of the plunder by the way, which rejectamenta were found in several gardens where coleworts grew, and not far from the houses of those witches, and were called butter of witches." Dr. Hutchinson, after arguing that it is as plain as the day that such froth in meadows and gardens is not from witches and spirits disgorging, "but from grasshoppers and other little insects, that hatch their young ones sometimes in cottons, and sometimes in froths, &c." adds, " and when I see Swedish judges, and Dr. Horneck after them learn from the rabble to call it 'witches' butter,' and hang and burn their neighbours from such evidence, I cannot but stand amazed, and am sorry so good a man as Dr. Horneck was so far overseen, as to translate such a dangerous history for our people to learn from.” 66 Of the Blockula witches, seventy were condemned, and most of them suffered death; moreover, as in every deep, there is a lower deep still, twenty children were whipped on the hands, thirty-six ran the gauntlet, and fifteen were executed! It is evident, from the earnestness with which Dr. Hutchinson argues against these monstrous indictments, that there was still (1720) much lurking belief in witchcraft in these kingdoms. Even now we often find evidence of its existence in the provinces, and whilst we write, the enlightened public of 1841 have been set a wondering at the haunted house at Clewer, which, for a time, bade fair to rival Mr. Mompesson's and his drummer, The Dæmon of Tedworth."* We had, according to the newspapers, the neighbouring magistrates and the police, the chemists, and the sexton with his sounding iron, all bent on discovering the inexplicable knocking, which ceased on the departure of the tenants, who, of course, cannot be expected to pay any rent. Not that we ever for a moment supposed that any of these wise and skilful visiters regarded the knockings as supernatural; and if any whisperer have hinted that some of them did shake their heads ominously, we would comfort them by calling to their remembrance, that Dr. Johnson went to hear the Cock-lane ghost,† and lost his temper when the pertinacious Boswell pressed him upon the point; and that some of the clergy asked it questions, which it answered by determinate "Yes" or "No" knocks. We now come to a less gloomy part of the subject, and proceed to inquire into the organization and natural habits of the cuckoo, not without the hope of interesting our readers in the history of a bird in which that almost universal and strongest affection in the warm-blooded vertebrata—the love for their offspring-seems nearly, if not entirely obliterated. Aristotle refuted the fable that the cuckoo was, at a certain period, changed into a hawk, a tale that most probably had its origin in the striking change of plumage that takes place. Few species of birds differ more from each other than does a young cuckoo from the full-grown bird, which bears no small resem blance to the merlin with his pinion of glossy blue." The Greek zoologist also noticed the fact that the female lays her eggs in the nests of other birds. Pliny repeats both these observations, and dilates upon the complacency with which the foster-parent regards the well-fed bulk of her supposititious nestling, suffering him to rob his wretched comates of their food, and them to be destroyed in her sight, till at last, when her overgrown pet is ready to fly, he finishes by making a meal of his nurse. After |