THE RA VEN. 289 



when the raven is brought up tame in civilised society ; for its per- 

 petual bickerings with stranger dogs, and its incautious approach to 

 the heels of vicious horses, seldom fail, sooner or later, to bring it 

 to an untimely end. Still, I should be the last man in the world to 

 question the veracity of remote antiquity, upon the mere strength of 

 hasty surmise. Those who are gone before us may possibly have 

 had better opportunities of ascertaining the longevity of birds, than 

 any which we now possess. 



I never tire of reading the old fables in which birds are intro- 

 duced. Notwithstanding the impossibilities and absurdities which 

 are manifest in those rich effusions of ancient wit and humour, still 

 I can always find much in them to convince me that the writers of 

 the olden times were no strangers to the real habits of birds. Ovid, 

 who flourished some two thousand years ago, tells of a remarkably 

 old raven. It might indeed have been a companion for Methuselah 

 himself. When Medea, that wicked, wanton, wandering witch, had 

 made up her mind to restore her aged father to the bloom of youth 

 (which was contrary to the order of the Fates), she boiled a pot of 

 herbs, and threw into it the bones and carcass of an owl. together 

 with a few slices of wolfs flesh, and the shell and inside of a fresh 

 water-turtle. To these she added the beak and head of a raven, 

 above nine hundred years old. 



" Quibus insuper addit 



Ora, caputque, novem cornicis ssecula passse." 



Thrice she soused her father over head in water, and thrice she held 

 him to the fire, and thrice she rubbed him well with brimstone. 



" Terque senem flamma, ter aqua, ter sulphure lustrat." 



She then applied her lancet to his jugular, and having let out all 

 the old man's blood, she replaced it with broth made from the ingre- 

 dients which she had stewed down for the operation. This did the 

 job, and up jumped her father ^Eson a spruce, dashing young fellow 

 in the prime of life, with a fine black beard in lieu of a white one. 

 From this operation, we might surmise that transfusion of blood in 

 surgery is no modern invention. 



Pity it is that the raven, a bird of such note and consequence in 



T 



