The people of Rome in the old days were told of a crystalline stone called alectorius, as large as a bean, to be found in the gizzard of the barnyard cock. It was held to have wonderful properties, endowing its possessor with strength, courage, and success with women and money, and to this apparently complete list of virtues is added by one historian the quality of invisibility. This last virtue also pertained to the stone placed by the raven in the throat of its fledgling, but the formalities described as necessary for anyone who sought to obtain it were quite impossible to fulfil. “It may, indeed,” as Hulme[[38]] remarks, “have had the same effect on the original owner, as there could scarcely be an authentic instance of such peculiar property being found.” On the other hand we are told that a stone from the hoopoe, when laid upon the breast of a sleeping man, forced him to reveal any rogueries he might have committed.
It is stated in Cassell’s Natural History (Vol. IV), that in India exists a popular superstition that if you will split the head of an adjutant stork before death you may extract from the skull “the celebrated stone called zahir mora, or ‘poison-killer,’ of great virtue and repute as an antidote to all kinds of poison.” One would suppose that all the adjutants in India would long ago have been exterminated, but in fact this is one of the most numerous of birds there—the scavenger of every village.
The common swallow was once believed to have two of these miraculous stones stowed away somewhere in its interior. One was red, and cured an invalid instantly: the other, a black one, brought good fortune. Also, it was reported, swallows found on a seabeach, by some sort of inspiration, a particular kind of stone which would restore sight to the blind; and it was to this legend that Longfellow alluded in Evangeline—
Seeking with eager eyes that wondrous stone which the swallow
Brings from the shore of the sea to restore the sight of her fledglings.
Various birds also gave, or strengthened, sight to their young by means of certain plants mentioned by old herbalists. Finally, it should not be overlooked that on page 152 of the most recent edition of Cruden’s celebrated Concordance[[51]] to the Bible, among the generally astonishing notes beneath the word “eagle” is printed the following: “It is said that it preserves its nest from poison, by having therein a precious stone, named Aetites (without which it is thought the eagle cannot lay her eggs, and which some use to prevent abortion and help delivery in women, by tying it above or below the navel) and keepeth it clean by the frequent use of the herb maiden-hair.”
Now it is all well enough to find this information in the writings of Pliny senior, who alleges that these “eagle-stones” (in fact natural hollow nodules of iron-impregnated clay) were transported by nesting eagles to their domiciles to assist them in ovulation, whence by analogy—recognizing unwittingly the kinship of men and animals—they would aid women in travail, and to smile over it with the shrewd editor of Vulgar Errors,[[33]] but it is odd to find such an absurdity recommended by a modern clergyman as “profitable” material for sermons.
Let me round out this chapter with that recognition of bird-migration in the custom among the Vikings of the 8th and 9th centuries of saying as they embarked upon some raid upon the coasts south of them that they were “following the swan’s path.”
CHAPTER V
NOAH’S MESSENGERS
Our first thought when we hear the word “deluge” is of Noah and his Ark, and the funny toy of our childhood rises to the mind’s eye. In that childhood we had no doubt that the flood described in the first book of the Old Testament covered the whole globe. Now we know that the story is a Semitic tradition, perhaps nothing more than a sun-myth in origin, although the actual occurrence of some extraordinary inundation may have got mixed with it and localized it. In fact, the belief in an all-submerging deluge, or, in what is its equivalent—namely, a time when the world was a plain of water with no land above its quiet surface—is a part of the mythology or theology, or both, of many diverse peoples in both hemispheres; and almost always birds are prominently associated with its incidents and the ensuing separation of land from water.