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CHAPTER III.

IF any philosopher should gird himself to the task of

tracing the vagaries of the Transmigrating Ens, as it has been termed, and following the spirit through its various phases, he would have an amusing but a puzzling time of it, even though he took Pythagoras for his guide. And yet that doctrine of the Metempsychosis, founded not improbably on the growth, dissolution, and regeneration of animal and vegetable natures, raises thoughts not to be hastily cast away. It mingles with our reasonings, be they grave or gay; suggests itself to Hamlet when he discourses of imperial Cæsar, and to the wag who, after decking the last resting-place of Quin with thyme and pot-marjoram, breathes the pious aspiration,—

And fat be the gander that feeds on his grave.

Bodies die but to revive. The carcass, uncontaminated by medical efforts to cheat the worm, soon swarms with animal life in a different form; and the decayed vegetable revives in the mucor which bursts from its dead fibres, to say nothing of the hosts of minute insects which live, and move, and have their being upon its remains. And this, be it remembered, is only the first stage patent to all eyes. But who shall say that when the cycle is completed, the dead body may not live again as a perfect animal or vegetable,-more perfect than when the sun first shone upon it in its nascent state?

In truth, all sublunary nature is apparently so full, that one may well understand the notion that the quantity of matter is infinitesimally small, and the volume of spirit enormously great. Jupiter, it is said, seeing this, threw down a capacious handful of souls upon this petit

tas de boue, and left them to scramble for the few bodies open to them.

If such tales be true, happy must the struggling soul have been that worked its way into the egg of a stork, that personification of all the virtues. Gratitude, temperance, chastity, piety,-these were a few of the qualities attributed to the bird by the ancients. Welcome everywhere, and bearing a charmed life, it was and is hailed as the harbinger of spring and the destroyer of evil things. Even the Dutchman grows animated when he sees the stork return to the well-known nest, and expresses his pleasure at beholding the snowy wader stalk about his polders by a reduplication of puffs from his eternal pipe. Nay, he has been known on such an occasion to withdraw the reeking tube from his lips for a moment, and ask the frogs how they liked their new king?

The disappearance of the storks in the winter, and their reappearance in the spring, gave rise to the same tales of brumal hybernation as were long rife about the swallows; and stories were told of a concatenation of storks, joined head and tail together, having been fished out of the water. The Lake of Como, if we recollect right, was one of the hybernacula out of which they were declared to have been taken, apparently dead, but revived by the fishermen, who restored animation by placing them in a warm bath. And yet Pliny had no doubt about their migration, and as little that they arrived from a great distance, though he says that in his time it was not known from what country they came or whither they retired. Old Belon, however, well knew that Africa was the locality of their winter quarters; and he gives evidence of their having been seen whitening the plains of Egypt in September and October. The same excellent ornithologist-blessings on him for a good observer-beheld a large flock of them in the act of

migration when he was at Abydos, in the month of August. They came from the north, and when they arrived at the Mediterranean Sea they wheeled round and round, then broke into companies, and proceeded no longer in one body. Dr. Shaw, in his journey over Mount Carmel, saw them coming from Egypt in flocks extending half-a-mile in breadth, each of which occupied three hours in passing over. There are stories of their being heralded in their flights by crows, who lead the way; others, again, say that a deadly enmity exists between the two races, and that stout battles have been witnessed between the storks and crows in Egypt.

The advent of the crows is announced by their cries, but the stork utters no vocal sound. This silence probably gave rise to the notion entertained by the ancients that the storks had no tongue. Their ordinary mode of communication is by clattering the mandibles like a pair of

castanets.

This peculiarity was known to the ancients.

Ipsa sibi plaudat crepitante ciconia rostro,

writes Ovid (Metam. vi. 97), and Dante refers to it in his description of the agonies of the guilty in the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth,

Eran l'ombre dolenti nella ghiaccia ;

Mettendo i denti in nota di Cicogna.*

Large are the assemblies and sonorous the clatterings that precede their autumnal migration. The quaint Philemon Holland thus renders Pliny's account of one of these gatherings, and making allowance for the time when the Roman wrote, there is little in it that has not been certified by modern observers :

When they be minded (writes the translator of Plinies Naturall Historie)—when they be minded to part out of our coasts, they assemble all together in one certain place appointed: there is not

* Inferno, canto xxxii. 1. 35, 36.

one left out nor absent of their owne kind, unlesse it be some that are not at libertie, but captive or in bondage. Thus (as if it had been published before by proclamation) they rise all in one entire companie, and away they flie. And albeit well knowne it might be afore that they were upon their remove and departure, yet was there never any man (watched he never so well) that could perceive them in their flight: neither do we at any time see when they are coming to us, before we know that they be alreadie come. The reason is because they doe the one and the other alwaies by night. And notwithstanding that they flie too and fro from place to place and make but one flight of it, yet be they supposed never to have arrived at any coast but in the night. There is a place in the open plaines and champion countrey of Asia, called PithonosCome where (by report) they assemble all together, and being met, keep a jangling one with another: but in the end, look which of them lagged behind and came tardie, him they teare in peeces, and then they depart. This also hath been noted, that after the Ides of August they be not lightly seene there.

:

But so

Some affirme constantly that storkes have no tongues. highly regarded they are for slaying of serpents, that in Thessalie it is accounted a capitall crime to kill a storke, and by law he is punished as a fellon in the case of manslaughter.

In Oppian's time the knowledge of the whereabout of the storks had somewhat advanced, for he speaks of accounts of some flying from Lycia, and others from Ethiopia. But however doubtful the ancients may have been as to the place where these birds passed the winter, none but those who delighted in marvels rather than facts discredited their migration. Long before the time of Pliny and Oppian it had been written,-‘Even the storke in the aire knoweth her appointed times, and the turtle and the crane, and the swallow, observe the time of their comming."*

Turn we now to the romantic history of the white stork. Laomedon's lovely daughter, Priam's charming sister, who shone among mortal virgins like the moon amidst the stars, vaunted in her pride that she was more

* Jerem. viii. 7. Imprinted at London by ROBErt Barker, Printer to the King's most Excellent Maiestie, 1615.'

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beautiful than the queen of heaven. Juno, who was not remarkable for patience under such insults, uttered the fiat of degradation; and poor Antigone found her delicate nose and exquisite mouth elongate into a red horny beak, and her fair body stilted up on two lofty skinny red legs, with nothing but the flattened nails at the end of her attenuated toes, to remind her of limbs cast in the most perfect feminine mould. This form of the nails did not escape Willughby, who says, writing of the bird,— 'Its claws are broad, like the nails of a man; so that #hatuwvuxos will not be sufficient to difference a man from a stork with its feathers pluckt off.' Poor Antigone! Instead of a king's board graced with every delicacy, her table was to be thereafter spread in the wilderness. But the irritable and jealous goddess seems to have had some touch of mercy; for, according to the legends, she left the transformed all her virtues and amiable qualities when she punished her insolence. Gratitude, temperance, chastity, piety, were some of the bright spots left to console her for her otherwise dark lot; and they have, it would seem, adorned the species ever since.

Of the gratitude of storks, there are stories enough to fill a volume. They were said, on their annual return to their nests on the house-tops, regularly to throw down to their landlord one of their young ones by way of rent or tribute,—an act of justice executed a little at the expense of their parental character. Well, if you are not inclined to believe this, best of readers, listen to the story of Heracleis of Tarentum, the good, the chaste, the pious Heracleis. She, when the angel of death smote her beloved husband, wept long and sorely, but not like her of Ephesus. No, she could no longer endure the sight of the empty chair and the widowed couch, but set up her abode at her husband's tomb. Here, as she sat in her sorrow on a lovely summer's day, when all was smiling but the dejected widow, she beheld a pair of storks