Even Tennyson has a poem on it, picturing a scene of the most charming nature, the pensive beauty of which is vastly enhanced by the bold use of the fable.
It has required both the hard scientific scrutiny of the past century and a wide scattering of geographical information, to offset in the minds of most of us the tendency to imagine that “over the hills and far away” things somehow are picturesquely different from those in our own humdrum neighborhood, and that perhaps yonder the laws of nature, so inexorable here, may admit now and then of exceptions. Amber came from—well, few persons knew precisely whence; and wasn’t it possible that it might be a concretion of birds’ tears, as some said?
Around thee shall glisten the loveliest amber
That ever the sorrowing sea-bird hath wept—
sang an enamored poet.
Facilis descensus Averni is a Latin phrase in constant use, with the implication that it is difficult to get back—sed revocare gradus, that’s the rub! But how many know that this dark little cliff-ringed lake near Cumae, in Italy, was anciently so named in the belief that because of its noxious vapors no bird could fly across it without being suffocated. Hence a myth placed there an entrance to the nether world, and, with keen business instincts, the Cumaean sybil intensified her reputation as a seer by taking as her residence a grotto near this baleful bit of water.
Who can forget the monumental mistake of that really great and philosophic naturalist, Buffon, in denying that the voices of American birds were, or could be, melodious. He said of our exquisite songster, the wood-thrush, that it represented the song-thrush of Europe which had at sometime rambled around by the Northern Ocean and made its way into America; and that it had there, owing to a change of food and climate, so degenerated that its cry was now harsh and unpleasant, “as are the cries of all birds that live in wild countries inhabited by savages.” The danger of error in drawing inferences as to purpose in nature is great in any case; but it is doubly so when the philosopher is mistaken as to his supposed facts.
By going back a few decades one might find examples of more or less amusing errors in natural history to the point of weariness, but with one or two illustrations from The Young Ladies’ Book (Boston, 1836), I will bring this chapter to its end. This little volume, doubtless English in origin, was intended for the entertaining instruction of school-girls, and in many respects was excellent, but when it ventured on American ornithology it put some amusing misinformation into its readers’ minds. It teaches them that our butcherbirds “bait thorns with grasshoppers to decoy the lesser insectivorous birds into situations where they may easily be seized”—a beautiful sample of teleological assumption of motive based on the fact that the shrike sometimes impales dead grasshoppers, mice and so forth on thorns or fence-splinters, having learned apparently that that is a good way to hold its prey (its feet are weak, and unprovided with talons) while it tears away mouthfuls of flesh. Often the victim is left there, only partly eaten, or perhaps untorn; and rarely, if ever, does the shrike return to it, and certainly it attracts no “lesser insectivorous” birds nor any other kind.
The author also instructs his young ladies that “the great American bittern has the property of emitting a light from its breast,” and so forth. His authority for this long-persistent and picturesque untruth was a review of Wilson’s American Ornithology in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History (London, Vol. vi., 835.) Speaking of this familiar marsh-bird, which, let me repeat, has no such aid in making a living, or need of it, as it is not nocturnal in its habits, the anonymous reviewer writes:
It is called by Wilson the great American bittern, but, what is very extraordinary, he omits to mention that it has the power of emitting a light from its breast, equal to the light of a common torch, which illuminates the water so as to enable it to discover its prey.... I took some trouble to ascertain the truth of this, which has been confirmed to me by several gentlemen of undoubted veracity, and especially by Mr. Franklin Peale, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Museum.