PARROT 685 
concerned had any knowledge of it. Aristotle is commonly sup- 
posed to be the first author who mentions a Parrot; but this is an 
error, for nearly a century earlier Ctesias in his /ndica (cap. 3),1 under 
the name of Birraxos (Bitiacus), so neatly described a bird which 
could speak an “Indian” language—naturally, as he seems to have 
thought—or Greek—if it had been taught so to do,—about as big 
as a Sparrow-Hawk (Hieraz), with a purple face and a black beard, 
otherwise blue-green (cyaneus) and vermilion in colour, so that there 
cannot be much risk in declaring that he must have had before him 
a male example of what is now commonly known as the Blossom- 
headed Parakeet, and to ornithologists as Palzxornis cyanocephalus, an 
inhabitant of many parts of India. Much ingenuity has been exer- 
cised in the endeavour to find the word whence this, and the later 
form of the Greek name, was derived, but to little or no purpose. 
After Ctesias comes Aristotle’s yirraxn (Psittace), which Sundevall 
. supposes him to have described only from hearsay ; but this matters 
little, for there can be no doubt that the Indian conquests of Alex- 
ander were the means of making the Parrot better known in Europe, 
and it is in reference to this fact that another Eastern species of 
Palxornis now bears the name of P. alezandri, though from the 
localities it inhabits it could not have had anything to do with the 
Macedonian king. That Africa had Parrots does not seem to have 
been discovered by the ancients till long after, as Pliny tells us 
(vi. 29) that they were first met with by explorers employed by 
Nero beyond the limits of Upper Egypt. These birds, highly 
prized from the first, reprobated by the moralist, and celebrated by 
more than one classical poet, as time went on were brought in great 
numbers to Rome, and ministered in various ways to the luxury of 
the age. Not only were they lodged in cages of tortoise-shell and 
ivory, with silver wires, but they were professedly esteemed as 
delicacies for the table, and one emperor is said to have fed his 
lions upon them! But there would be little use in dwelling longer 
on these topics. With the decline of the Roman empire the demand 
for Parrots in Europe lessened, and so the supply dwindled, yet all 
knowledge of them was not wholly lost, and they are occasionally 
mentioned by one writer or another until in the fifteenth century 
began that career of geographical discovery which has since pro- 
ceeded uninterruptedly. This immediately brought with it the 
knowledge of many more forms of these birds than had ever before 
been seen, for whatever races of men were visited by European 
navigators—whether in the East Indies or the West, whether in 
Africa or in the islands of the Pacific—it was almost invariably 
found that even the most savage tribes had tamed some kind of 
Parrot ; and, moreover, experience soon shewed that no bird was 
1 The passage seems to have escaped the notice of all naturalists until Broderip 
mentioned it in his article ‘‘ Psittacide"’ in the Penny Cyclopxdia (xix. p. 83). 
