To him, indeed, inhabited regions owe all their security. In the furthest Africa, at the Cape, the good serpent-eater defends man against the reptiles. Peaceable in disposition and gentle in aspect, he seems to engage without passion in his dangerous encounters. The gigantic jabiru does not labour less in the deserts of Guiana, where man as yet ventures not to live. Their perilous savannahs, alternately inundated and parched, a dubious ocean teeming in the sunshine with a horrible population of monsters as yet unknown, possess, as their superior inhabitant, their intrepid scavenger, a noble bird of battle, retaining some relics of the ancient weapons with which the primeval birds were very probably provided in their struggle against the dragon. These are a horn on the head, and a spur on each of the wings. With the first it stirs up, excites, and rouses out of the mud its enemy. The others serve as a guard and defence: the reptile which hugs and folds it in its embrace, at the same time plunges into its own body these keen darts, and by its constriction, its own actual exertions, is poniarded.
This brave and beautiful bird, last-born of the ancient worlds and a surviving witness to forgotten encounters, which is born, lives, and dies in the slime, in the primitive cloaca, has no stain nevertheless of his unclean cradle. I know not what moral instinct raises and supports him above it. His grand and formidable voice, which sways the desert, announces from afar the gravity and dignified heroism of the noble and haughty purifier. The kamichi (Palamedéa cornuta), as he is called, is rare; he forms a genus of himself, a species which is not divided.
Despising the ignoble promiscuousness of the low world in which he lives, he lives alone, with but one mate. Undoubtedly, in his career of war, his mate is also a companion-in-arms. They love, they fight together; they follow the same destiny. Theirs is that soldierly marriage of which Tacitus speaks: "Sic vivendum, sic pereundum,"—"To life, to death." When this tender companionship, this consoling succour, fails the kamichi, he disdains to protract his existence; he rejoins the loved one which he cannot survive.
PURIFICATION.