FABLE AND FOLKLORE 47 



like a black swan." The comparison was meant to indi- 

 cate something improbable to the point of absurdity; and 

 in that sense has rara avis been used ever since. 



For more than fifteen hundred years Juvenal's expres- 

 sion for extreme rarity held good; but on January 6, 

 1697, tri e Dutch navigator Willem de Vlaming, visiting 

 the southwestern coast of Australia, sent two boats ashore 

 to explore the present harbor of Perth. "There their 

 crews first saw two and then more black swans, of which 

 they caught four, taking two of them alive to Batavia; 

 and Valentyne, who several years later recounted this 

 voyage, gives in his work a plate representing the ship, 

 boats and birds at the mouth of what is now known from 

 this circumstance as Swan River, the most important 

 stream of the thriving colony now State of Western 

 Australia, which has adopted this very bird as its armorial 

 symbol." 



Another Australian bird, that, like the black swan, has 

 obtained a picturesque immortality in a coat-of-arms ; 

 and on postage stamps, is the beautiful lyre-bird, first dis- 

 covered in New South Wales in 1789, and now a feature 

 in the armorial bearings of that State in the Australian 

 Commonwealth. New Zealand's stamps show the apteryx 

 (kiwi) and emeu. 



One might extend this chapter by remarking on various 

 birds popularly identified with certain countries, as the 

 ibis with Egypt, the nightingale with England and Persia, 

 the condor with Peru, the red grouse with Scotland, the 

 ptarmigan with Newfoundland, and so on. Then might 

 be given a list of birds w T hose feathers belonged ex- 

 clusively to chieftanship, and so had a sort of tribal sig- 

 nificance. Thus in Hawaii a honeysucker, the mamo, 

 furnished for the adornment of chiefs alone the rich 



