Essay on the Theory of the Earth

by baron Georges Cuvier

APPENDIX.

On the birds to which the name of Ibis was given by the ancient Egyptians.

Every body has heard of the Ibis, a bird to which the ancient Egyptians rendered a religious homage; which they reared within the precincts of their temples; allowed to wander unmolested through their towns; whose murderer, even although he had involuntarily become so, was punished with death[341]; which they embalmed with as much care as their parents;—a bird to which they attributed a virgin purity; an inviolable attachment to their country, of which it was the emblem, an attachment so great that it suffered itself to die of hunger when it was transported elsewhere;—a bird which possessed instinct enough to know the increase and waning of the moon, and to regulate accordingly the quantity of its daily food, and the development of its young; which arrested at the frontiers of Egypt the serpents which would otherwise have carried destruction into that sacred land[342], and which inspired them with such terror that they dreaded its very feathers[343];—a bird, in fine, whose form the gods would have assumed, had they been forced to adopt a mortal figure, and into which Mercury was really transformed, when he had a mind to traverse the earth, and instruct men in the sciences and arts.

No other animal could have been so easy to recognize as this; for there is no other of which the ancients have left us at once, as of the ibis, excellent descriptions, accurate and even coloured figures, and the body itself preserved with its feathers, under the triple envelope of a preservative bitumen, thick and close folds of linen, and solid and well varnished vases. And yet, of all the modern authors who have spoken of the ibis, there is but one, the celebrated Bruce, a traveller more famous for his courage than for the justness of his opinions in natural history, who has not blundered respecting the true species of this bird; and his ideas with regard to this subject, however accurate they were, have not even been adopted by naturalists[344].

After several changes of opinion respecting the ibis, it was seemingly agreed, at the period when I published the first edition of this work, to give the name of Ibis to a bird a native of Africa, almost of the size of the stork, with white plumage, having the quills black, perched upon long red legs, armed with a long arched beak, of a pale yellow colour, sharp at its edges, rounded at its base, and notched at its point, and whose face is covered with a red skin destitute of feathers, which do not extend farther forward than the eyes.

Such is the Ibis of Perrault[345], the Ibis candida of Brisson[346], the Ibis blanc d’Egypte of Buffon[347], and the Tantalus Ibis of Linnæus, in his twelfth edition. It was to this same bird, also, that Blumenbach, while he avowed that it is of very rare occurrence at the present day, at least in Lower Egypt, asserted that the Egyptians rendered divine honours[348]; and yet this naturalist had possessed opportunities of examining bones of the true ibis in a mummy which he opened in London[349].

I also participated in the error of those celebrated men whom I have just mentioned, until the moment when I was enabled to examine some mummies of the ibis by myself. This pleasure was procured for me, for the first time, by the late M. Fourcroy, to whom M. Grobert, Colonel of Artillery, on his return from Egypt, had given two of these mummies, both taken from the pits of Saccara. On carefully exposing them, we perceived that the bones of the embalmed bird were much smaller than those of the Tantalus ibis of naturalists; that they did not much exceed those of the curlew in size, that its beak resembled that of the latter, being only a little shorter in proportion to its thickness, and not at all that of the tantalus; and, lastly, that its plumage was white with the quills marked with black, as the ancients have described it.

We are therefore convinced, that the bird which the ancient Egyptians embalmed, was by no means the Tantalus ibis of naturalists, that it was smaller, and that it was to be sought for in the curlew genus. We found, after some inquiries, that the mummies of the ibis which had been opened before by different naturalists, were similar to ours. Buffon says expressly that he examined several of them; that the birds which they contained had the beak and size of curlews; and yet he has blindly followed Perrault in taking the African tantalus for the ibis. One of those mummies opened by Buffon still exists in the museum; it is similar to those which we have examined.

Dr Shaw, in the supplement to his Travels[350], describes and figures with care the bones of a similar mummy. The beak, he says, was six English inches in length, similar to that of the curlew, &c. In a word, its description agrees entirely with ours.