FABLE AND FOLKLORE 175 



according to prescribed rules. It is no wonder that an 

 extensive priesthood was needed to aid in this intricate 

 guarding against danger or the foretelling of benefits 

 to come; and one suspects that the whole thing was a 

 clever invention by the sacerdotal class to provide priests 

 with a good living. Nor have the practices, and much 

 less the superstitious notions behind them, become wholly 

 obsolete, for not only in India and China are the move- 

 ments of birds now watched with anxiety, and offerings 

 made to them in the temples and individually by the 

 peasantry, but similar ideas and practices prevail in all 

 Malayan lands, as readers of such books as Skeat's Malay 

 Magic 7 may learn. 



Perhaps learned students of ancient ways of thinking 

 may be able to explain why the direction of a prophetic 

 bird from the listener was an essential element in its 

 message: for example, why is the cawing of a crow 

 east of you a more favorable portent than cawing from 

 the west? Lord Lytton studies this question briefly in 

 the Notes to his translation of the Odes of Horace, who, 

 in his Ode to Galatea, exclaims : 



May no chough's dark shadow 

 Lose thee a sunbeam, nor one green woodpecker 

 Dare to tap leftward. 



Why should "leftward" (Icevus) signify ill-luck in this 

 case, when the left was considered lucky by the Romans, 

 although unlucky by the Greeks? "It is suggested," is 

 Lytton's comment, "that the comparison may have arisen 

 from the different practice of the Greeks and Romans in 

 taking note of birds — the former facing north, the latter 

 south [an attitude connected with migration?] I believe, 

 however, it was the tap of the woodpecker, and not his 



