66o 



OSPRE Y 



OSPRAY or OSPREY,i a word said to be corrupted from " Ossi- 

 frage," in Latin Omifraga or bone-breaker. The Oisifraga of Pliny 

 {Hkt. Nat. X, 3) and some other classical 

 writers seems, as already said, to have been 

 the Lammergeyer (page 503) ; but the 

 name, not inapplicable in that case, has 

 been transferred — through a not uncommon 

 but inexplicable confusion — to another bird 

 which is no breaker of bones, save incident- 

 ally those of the fishes it devours.- The 

 Osprey is a rapacious bird, of middling 

 size and of conspicuously-marked plumage, 

 the white of its lower parts, and often of 

 its head, contrasting sharply with the dark 

 brown of the back and most of its upper 

 parts when the bird is seen on the wing. It 

 is the Falco haliaetus of Linnaeus, but un- 

 questionably deserving generic separation 

 was, in 1810, established by Savigny [Ois. 

 de VEgijpte, p. 35) as the type of a new genus 

 which he was pleased to tei-m Pandion — a 

 name since pretty generally accepted. It 

 has commonly been kept in the Family 

 FalconidiV, but of late regarded as the repre- 

 sentative of a separate 



Bones of Ospbey's Foot. 

 tarsometatarsal bridge over the ex- 

 tensor muscle of the toes ; h, tibial 

 bridge over the same. 



Family, Pandionida^, 

 for which view not a 

 little can be said.^ 

 Pandion differs from 



^ In the so - called 

 " plume - trade " the word 

 is applied to the feathers 

 taken from the back of 

 certain Ec4Rets (c/. Exter- 

 mination, p. 228). 



- Another supjiosed old form of the name is "Orfraie" ; 

 bttt that is said by M. Rolland {Faunc i^opul. France, 

 ii. p. 9, note) cjuoting M. Suchier (Zeitschr. Emi. Philol. 

 i. p. 432), to arise from a mingling of two wholly different sources: — (1) Ori- 

 2)elargus, Oripcrafjus, Orprais, and (2) Osslfraga. "Orfraie" again is occasionally 

 interchanged with Effraic (which, through such dialectical forms as Fresaie, Fres- 

 saia, is said to come from the Latin jn's&saga), the ordinary French name for the 

 Barn-OwI, Aluco flammcus (see Owl, ivfra, p. 679, note 2) ; but the subject is 

 too complex for any but an expert philologist to treat. According to Prof. Skeat 

 (Etijmol. Did. p. 408), "Asprey" is the oldest English form ;' but "Osprey" 

 dates from Cotgrave at least. 



" Dr. Sharpe goes further, and makes a " SwhoTder " Faudmies ; but the 



