216 The Birds of Virgil. 



has actually asserted that cranes, when flying 

 against the wind, w r ill take up stones with their 

 feet, and stuff their long throats full of gravel, 

 which they discharge when they alight safely on 

 the ground ! l 



Virgil mentions about twenty kinds of birds, 

 most of them several times. These twenty kinds 

 do not correspond so much to our species as to 

 our genera ; for the Greeks and Romans, I need 

 hardly say, had only very rough-and-ready methods 

 of classification, just as is the case with uneducated 

 people at the present day. When they found 

 birds tolerably like each other, they readily put 

 them down as of the same kind, rarely marking 

 minor differences. Thus corvus appears to stand 

 for both crow and rook ; picus stands for all the 

 woodpeckers inhabiting Italy ; by accipiter may 

 be understood any kind of hawk. But in spite of 

 this difficulty, it is sometimes possible to make 

 out the particular species which is alluded to, 

 partly by getting information as to those which 



1 Plin., N. H. x. 60. Aristotle refutes the fable, which is 

 alluded to by Aristophanes in the Birds (1137)- See Arist. 

 H, JV. viii. 14. 5. 



