64 BIRDS IN LEGEND 



The unromantic fact was that the natives of the Moluccas 

 then, as now, after skilfully shooting with arrows or 

 blow-guns and skinning the (male) birds, cut off the legs 

 and dusky wings and folded the prepared skin about a 

 stick run through the body and mouth, in which form 

 "paradise-birds" continued to come to millinery markets 

 in New York and London. A somewhat similar blunder 

 in respect to swallows (or swifts?) has given us in the 

 martlet, as a heraldic figure, a quaint perpetuation of an 

 error in natural history. "Even at the present day," 

 remarks Fox Davies, 111 speaking of England, "it is popu- 

 larly believed that the swallow has no feet ... at any 

 rate the heraldic swallow is never represented with feet, 

 the legs terminating with the feathers that cover the 

 shank." 



I do not know where Dryden got the information sug- 

 gesting his comparison, in Threnodia Augustalis, "like 

 birds of paradise that lived on mountain dew" ; but the 

 idea is as fanciful as the modern Malay fiction that this 

 bird drops its egg, which bursts as it approaches the 

 earth, releasing a fully developed young bird. Another 

 account is that the hen lays her eggs on the back of her 

 mate. Both theories are wild guesses in satisfaction of 

 ignorance, for no one yet knows precisely the breeding- 

 habits of these shy forest-birds, the females of which are 

 rarely seen. Dryden may have read that in Mexico, as 

 a Spanish traveller reported, hummingbirds live on dew ; 

 or he may have heard of the medieval notion that ravens 

 were left to be nourished by the dews of heaven, and, 

 with poetic license to disregard classification, transferred 

 the feat to the fruit-eating birds of paradise. 



Next comes that old yarn about geese that grow on 

 trees. When or where it arose nobody knows, but some- 



