94 SYLVA CRITICA CANADENSIUM. 
Electra. "AAW eué 7 & otovdece apapev gpévac, 7A "Iruv, dudv ” Troy 
Chopbpetat, “opis atvfopéva, (Sophocles, Llectra, v. 147.) 
Adschylus (Agamemnon, vv. 1110 foll.) puts similar language into 
the mouth of the Chorus with regard to Cassandra’s dirge. The name 
ltys is, of course, an onomatopeia. It is superfluous to multiply 
examples; a few of the more striking ones will serve our purpose. In 
addition to those mentioned above, we may take Homer, Odyssey, B. 
XIX., v. 522; Catullus, Ode LXV., v. 14; Virgil, Georgics, B. IV., 
v. 514. 
In all these passages it is the infelix avis, the “hapless bird,” 
which is present to their thoughts. From these considerations I 
have been tempted to propose dus and cano as a probable derivation. 
Dus is the prefix which we find in the compounds dvony7c, dbc0po0s 
and other words, with the notion of “hard, bad, unlucky, &ec.” The 
letters d and / are, as is well known, interchangeable, cp. ¢.g. daxpupa 
and lacruma ‘‘a tear.” Thus luscinia would be the “ plaintive 
songstress.” 
