Alcyon and Acalanthis. 24.1 



our Kingfisher, and believed Aristotle to have 

 clone so in the passage he copied, it is almost 

 unreasonable to doubt. 



It is, however, an open question whether the 

 bird ordinarily known to the Greeks as aAxunjv is 

 to be identified with the Kingfisher. The greatest 

 living authority on the birds of the Levant, Canon 

 Tristram of Durham, tells me that he has con- 

 vinced himself that it is not the Kingfisher, but 

 the Tern or Sea-swallow : a rare coin of Eretria 

 led him to this conclusion, on which a Tern is 

 figured, sitting on the back of a cow. 1 And it 

 must be allowed that the Greeks seem to have 

 thought of their aXxutov as a sea bird no less than 

 as a river bird. Aristotle remarks that it goes 

 up rivers, but he seems to have thought of it 

 mainly as a sea bird, and a well-known passage 

 in the seventh Idyll of Theocritus appears to bear 

 him out. But I am not here specially concerned 

 with Greek ornithology, and what Virgil says of 



1 I have seen a photograph of this coin, and satisfied myself 

 that the bird was meant for a Tern. But I have so far been 

 unable to discover any connection between Eretria and the 

 (\\KVWI-. Sundevall is confident that Aristotle's bird is the 

 Kingfisher. 



K 



