26 BIRDS OF THE WAVE AND WOODLAND 



in the migration of birds, or it would not happen with such 

 pitiless regularity. But it does not look as if the advantage 

 were on the side of the birds. 



And now to get back to my thrush. W^hen this bird was 

 first identified with both throstle and " mavis " is a pretty 

 point that some bird-lover might care to follow out. It 

 certainly is quite of modern date, for I find Spenser making 

 the mavis as one bird "reply" to the thrush as another; 

 in poet-laureate Skelton's poem the " threstill " is contrasted 

 with the mavis — "the threstill with her warblynge, the 

 mavis with her whistell " — and quite as explicitly in Gas- 

 coigne. Harrison, again, clearly distinguishes the two as 

 being different birds. So that the thrush-throstle-mavis 

 was not a single bird before, at any rate, the middle of 

 the seventeenth century. And for myself, I should not be 

 surprised if it were found on inquiry that the mavis was 

 originally the blackbird, and that it is an old English word, 

 and not a Scotch one, any more than " merle." At any rate, 

 this much is certain, that Chaucer's English was " a well of 

 Enoflish undefiled " ; and he sinos both of mavis and of 

 merle as of birds that he knew. And in Chaucer's day, 

 Scotland was a fearsome region situated " in foreign parts," 

 and inhabited by a race of human beings who only differed 

 from Irish in being worse. And Chaucer did not speak Scotch. 

 But, as I have said, the origin of our bird-and-beast names is 

 a very pretty subject still awaiting the philological naturalist, 



