GLOSSY IBIS. 117 



destroying all the beetles and grasshoppers which it finds. Thus 

 accustomed to favor and immunity (like our own Vulture scav- 

 engers), in Egypt these birds advanced without fear into the 

 midst of the cities. Strabo relates that they filled the streets 

 and lanes of Alexandria to such a degree as to become trou- 

 blesome and importunate ; and Hasselquist remarks that in 

 Lower Egypt as soon as the Nile becomes freed from its inun- 

 dations, they arrive in such numbers as to be seen morning 

 and evening frequenting the gardens and covering whole 

 palm-trees with their flocks. The Egyptian Ibis is likewise 

 said to construct its nest familiarly in the clustering fronds of 

 the date-palm, where it lays four eggs, and sits, according to 

 the fanciful calculation of ^lian, as many days as the star 

 Isis takes to perform the revolution of its phases. 



To enumerate the various fictions and falsehoods with which 

 the ancients have chosen to embellish the history of the Ibis 

 would be as vain and useless to the naturalist as to the sober 

 historian. Even Josephus has the credulity to relate that 

 when Moses made war on the Ethiopians, he carried, in cages 

 of papyrus, a great number of the Ibis, to oppose them to the 

 serpents ! Fables of this kind are now no longer capable of 

 being substituted for facts, and the naturalist contents him- 

 self with the humbler, but more useful, employment of simply 

 describing and delineating nature as it issued from the hands 

 of its omnipotent Creator. This superstition has also had its 

 day, and the Ibises, no longer venerated even in Egypt, are 

 in the autumn commonly shot and ensnared by the Arabs for 

 food ; and the markets of the sea-coast are now abundantly 

 supplied with them as game, together with the white species, 

 both of which are ignominiously exposed for sale deprived of 

 their heads, — a spectacle from which the ancient Egyptians 

 would have recoiled with horror. So fickle and capricious, 

 because unreasonable, is the dominion of superstition ! 



The Glossy Ibis is a rare bird in this faunal province, but it 

 occurs as an occasional visitor north to Massachusetts and Ontario, 

 and in 1878 was seen on Prince Edward's Island. The nest has 

 not been found north of Florida. 



