202 BIRDS IN LEGEND 



Such wonder-tales have a truly phenixlike quality of 

 indestructibility. As late as the time of Charles I of Eng- 

 land there lived in Lambeth, on the Surrey side of 

 London, John Tradescant, renowned as traveller and 

 florist, who accumulated an extensive "physic-garden" 

 and museum of antiquities and curiosities. He was a 

 man of science, but to satisfy the popular taste of the 

 time, as Pennant explains, his museum contained a feather 

 alleged to be of the dragon, and another of the griffin. 

 "You might have found here two feathers of the tail 

 of the phoenix, and the claw of the rukh, a bird capable 

 to trusse an elephant." This collection after the death of 

 Tradescant's son in 1622, became the property of Elias 

 Ashmole, and it was the nucleus of the Ashmolean 

 Museum founded at Oxford in 1682. 



But phenix, rukh, anka, simurgh, garuda, feng-huang 

 and others that have not been mentioned, such as Yel, the 

 mythical raven of our Northwest, and those of Malaya 

 described by Skeat, 7 are all, apparently, members of the 

 brood hatched ages ago in that same sunrise nest and 

 still flying amid rosy clouds of prehistoric fable. 



The first glimpse of them is on the seals and tablets 

 recovered from Mesopotamian ruin-mounds. In the 

 mystic antiquity of the Summerian kingdom of Ur and 

 its capital-city Lagash, a gigantic eagle, "the divine bird 

 Imgig" was the royal cognizance. In those days, as Dr. 

 Ward 23 discloses from his study of the oldest Babylonian 

 cylinders, people told one another tales of monstrous and 

 fantastic birds of prey that could fly away with an ante- 

 lope in each talon, and which fought, usually victoriously, 

 against huge winged and feathered dragons with bodies 

 like those of crocodiles, and sometimes with human heads. 



