OP ARTS AND SCIENCES. 215 



ness and fashion of their heads and neckes, which are wrinkled hke a 

 turheyes, but white, and not so sharp-billed. They also breed their 



young of the egges which they lay They are very wittie 



Shortlie after their coming in, the male and female couple, which wee 

 call cooling ; * this they continue some three days together, during 

 which time they will scarce separate, though a boat come to them, nor 



hardly when they are smitten The shee turckle comes up by 



night upon some sandie bay. They are easily taken .... when they 

 are cooling^ 



" As Virginia, Massachusetts, and other parts of the continent, and 

 various West-India islands, were successively colonized by Englishmen, 

 the use of the words turtle and turkle spread with the colonists, the 

 form turhle taking that precedence in the common speech f of New Eng- 

 land and the middle colonies, which it holds to this day ; while turtle^ 



ing the head of the female with its fore feet for several minutes." — Agassiz, 

 Contributions, &c. I. 300. 



It might at first be supposed that sailors could be little acquainted with the habits 

 of the turtle-dove ; but it is a singular fact that the early voyagers to America, from 

 the beginning, speak of the turtle, or turtle-dove, as among the birds they most 

 commonly met with, and it frequently figures on the same page, and sometimes 

 in the same sentence, with the tortoise. Spanish voyagers early bestowed their 

 name for this bird on the West-India island, Tortola. 



*■ Here, also, there is probably allusion to a bird which is prominently mentioned 

 in these Bermuda narratives. See the accounts of the Common Coot in Wilson's 

 and other books on ornithology, particularly as to their manner of assembling to 

 breed near the shore, but not on it. Indeed, they can hardly be said to live on 

 drij land. The word cooling is not registered in Dictionaries, but it is found 

 afterwards in use in the West Indies (" Cooting-tlme," Hughes's History of Barba- 

 does, 1750) ; and in the Fauna of Georgia, at this day, there are counted among the 

 tortoises four different kinds o{" coolers." (White's " Statistics of Georgia," 1849.) 



t Rarely, however, found in books. Wood, in his "New England's Prospect" 

 (1639), thus celebrates the wealth of Massachusetts Bay : — 



" The luscious lobster, with the cod-fish raw, 

 The brinish oyster, muscle, periwigge. 

 The tortoise, sought by the Indian squaw," &c. ; 



and Cotton Mather ("Christian Philosopher," 1721), bom and bred here, never 

 departs from the old use, though " his Essays are not altogether destitute of 

 American communications." 



But Josselyn, in his "New-England Rarities" (1673), says, that, among the 

 " fishes " here, he found the " tortoise, torteise, tortuga, tortisse, turcle, or turtle, of 

 divers kinds." Turkle soon became a confirmed spoken provincialism among the 

 less educated, and was applied alike to all tortoises, in spite of the Bible and com- 



