38 BIRD-OF-PARADISE 
but it is now certain that he was anticipated by Maximilianus 
Transylvanus, a young man who was residing in the Spanish court 
on the arrival of the survivors of Magellan’s company, and 
promptly wrote to +#=@eber, the Archbishop of Salzburg, an 
account of their discoveries and spoils, sending moreover to him 
one of the wonderful birds they had obtained. This account (De 
Moluccis insulis &c.)1 was published at Cologne in the January 
following, and the native name of the birds, of which it seems that 
five examples were brought home, is given as Mamuco-Diata, a 
variant of Manucodiata, meaning the Bird of the Gods, a name 
which seems to be still in use (cf. Crawfurd, Malay and Engl. Dict. 
p. 97). But it may well be that even before this Birds-of-Paradise 
were known to Europeans, for the Portuguese reached the Moluccas 
in 1510, to say nothing of the possibility of skins being imported 
by Eastern traders at a much earlier period. Belon, who travelled 
in the Levant between 1546 and 1549, mentions (Observations 
de plusieurs singularitez &e. liv. iii. chap. 25), among the feathery 
adornments of the Janissaries, plumes which could hardly be other 
than those of these birds; and expressly states that they were 
obtained from the Arabs.? His statement was first published in 
1553, and in the same year appeared the work of Cardanus, De 
Subtilitate, wherein (lib. x.) the Manucodiata, as the Bird-of-Paradise 
now began to be called (the adoption of its Malay name shewing 
that knowledge of it was derived from Spanish or Portuguese navi- 
gators), is made to support the author’s argument. In 1555 it was 
again treated of by Belon, as well as by Gesner, who figured (p. 612) 
what seems to have been a specimen of Paradisea minor, both 
of them expressing doubt as to the truth of the stories which were 
already rife on the subject. Some of these were touched upon in 
1557 by J. C. Scaliger in his reply (Eaotericarum exercitationum Liber 
XV. cexxviii. 2) to Cardanus, while in 1599 Aldrovandus (Ornithol. 
(which were doubtless cut off) but in their place long feathers of different colours 
like great plumes (pennacchi), the tail like a Thrush’s, and all the rest of the 
feathers, the wings excepted, of a dull colour. Much of this description fits the 
only species of Bird-of-Paradise that inhabits Batchian, the ruler of which 
island, as above stated, gave the birds ; but that species remained unknown to 
naturalists until Mr. Wallace procured examples in October 1858 (A/alay Archi- 
pelago, ii. pp. 40, 41), and it was subsequently described as Semioptera 
wallacit. 
1 [ have not seen the original, but a fac-simile reprint, together with a trans- 
lation of it,is given by the late Mr. Henry Stevens of Vermont in his Johann 
Schéner &c., edited by Mr. C. H. Coote (London: 1888). 
* He said that they belonged to birds called Lhintaces, which some 
modern writers identified with the Apus of classical authors, though he himself 
thought they were the feathers of the Phenix. <A plausible case might indeed 
be made out for connecting the legend of the bird last-named with that of the 
gods and of paradise. 
