It is plain that the plowman-poet was too canny to believe it, but perhaps it is well to say that there is no foundation in fact for this extraordinary charge. Ravens are faithful and careful parents: in fact Shakespeare makes a character in Titus Andronicus mention that “some say that ravens foster forlorn children,” a view quite the opposite of the other.
Another calumny is thoughtlessly repeated by Brewer[[34]] in his widely used reference-book Phrase and Fable (which unfortunately is far from trustworthy in the department of natural history) when he records: “Ravens by their acute sense of smell, discern the savor of dying bodies, and under the hope of preying on them, light on chimney-tops or flutter about sick-rooms.”
The correction to be made here is not to the gruesome superstition but to the asserted keenness of the bird’s sense of smell. The gathering of vultures to a dead animal is not by its odor, but by the sight of the carcass by one, and the noting of signs of that fact by others, who hasten to investigate the matter. Oliver Goldsmith[[32]] fell into the same error when he wrote of the protective value, as he esteemed it, of this sense in birds in general, “against their insidious enemies”; and cited the practice of decoymen, formerly so numerous as wildfowl trappers in the east of England, “who burn turf to hide their scent from the ducks.” The precaution was wasted, for none of the senses in birds is so little developed or of so small use as the olfactory. Goldsmith’s Animated Nature was, a century ago, the fountain of almost all popular knowledge of natural history among English-reading people, and was often reprinted. As a whole it was a good and useful book, but its accomplished author was not a trained naturalist, and absorbed some statements that were far from authentic—perhaps in some cases he was so pleased with the narrative that he was not sufficiently critical of its substance, as in the story of the storks in Smyrna:
The inhabitants amuse themselves by taking away some of the storks’ eggs from the nests on their roofs, and replacing them with fowls’ eggs. “When the young are hatched the sagacious male bird discovers the difference of these from their own brood and sets up a hideous screaming, which excites the attention of the neighboring storks, which fly to his nest. Seeing the cause of their neighbor’s uneasiness, they simultaneously commence pecking the hen, and soon deprive her of life, supposing these spurious young ones to be the produce of her conjugal infidelity. The male bird in the meantime appears melancholy, though he seems to conceive she justly merited her fate.”
In Goldsmith’s day such contributions to foreign zoology were common. Even the so-called scientific men of early Renaissance times indulged in the story-teller’s joy. Albertus Magnus asserted that the sea-eagle and the osprey swam with one foot, which was webbed, and captured prey with the other that was armed with talons. Aldrovandus backed him up, and everybody accepted the statement until Linnæus laughed them out of it by the simple process of examining the birds. These, you may protest, are not mistakes but pure fancies; yet it is only a short step from them to the romance, hardly yet under popular doubt, that the albatross broods its eggs in a raftlike, floating nest and sleeps on the wing, as you may read in Lalla Rookh:
While on a peak that braved the sky
A ruined temple tower’d so high
That oft the sleeping albatross
Struck the wild ruins with her wing,
And from her cloud-rocked slumbering