FABLE AND FOLKLORE 63 



great bird of paradise in naming this species Paradisca 

 apoda (footless) ; and it was done through an even worse 

 misunderstanding than in the case of Trochilus — or else 

 as a careless joke. It is true that at that time no perfect 

 specimen had been seen in Europe ; yet it is hard to under- 

 stand Linne's act, for he could not have put more faith 

 in the alleged natural footlessness of this bird than in the 

 many other marvelous qualities ascribed to it. Wallace 

 has recounted some of these myths in his Malay 

 Archipelago : 35 



When the earliest European voyagers reached the Moluccas 

 in search of cloves and nutmegs, they were presented with the 

 dried skins of birds so strange and beautiful as to excite the 

 admiration even of those wealth-seeking rovers. The Malay 

 traders gave them the name of "manuk dewata," or God's birds ; 

 and the Portuguese, finding they had no feet or wings, and being 

 unable to learn anything authentic about them, called them 

 "passares de sol" or birds of the sun; while the learned Dutch- 

 men, who wrote in Latin, called them avis paradeus or paradise- 

 bird. Jan van Linschoten gives these names in 1598, and tells 

 las that no one has seen these birds alive, for they live in the 

 air, always turning toward the sun, and never lighting on the 

 earth till they die; for they have neither feet nor wings, as he 

 adds, may be seen by the birds carried to India, and sometimes 

 to Holland, but being very costly they were rarely seen in 

 Europe. More than a hundred years later Mr. William Fennel, 

 who accompanied Dampier . . . saw specimens at Amboyna 

 and was told that they came to Banda to eat nutmegs, which in- 

 toxicated them, and made them fall senseless, when they were 

 killed by ants. [Tavernier explains that the ants ate away their 

 legs — thus accounting for the footlessness.] 



It is to this nutmeg dissipation that Tom Moore alludes 

 in Lalla Rookh: 



Those golden birds that in the spice time drop 

 About the gardens, drunk with that sweet fruit 

 Whose scent has lured them o'er the summer flood. 



