318 CUCULID^E. 



a metamorphosis twice a year, appearing during the 

 summer months as a Cuckoo, " a bird of the hawk kind, 

 though destitute of curved talons and hooked beak, and 

 having the bill of a Pigeon ; should it chance to appear 

 simultaneously with a Hawk it was devoured, being the 

 sole example of a bird being killed by one of its own 

 kind. In winter it actually changed into a Merlin, 

 but reappeared in spring in its own form, but with an 

 altered voice, laid a single egg, or rarely two, in the nest 

 of some other bird, generally a Pigeon, declining to rear 

 its own young, because it knew itself to be a common 

 object of hostility among all birds, and that its brood 

 would be in consequence unsafe, unless it practised a 

 deception. The young Cuckoo being naturally greedy, 

 monopolized the food brought to the nest by its foster 

 parents : it thus grew fat and sleek, and so excited its 

 dam with admiration of her lovely offspring, that she 

 first neglected her own chicks, then suffered them to 

 be devoured before her eyes, and finally fell a victim 

 herself to his voracious appetite."* A strange fiction, yet 

 not more strange than the truth, a glimmering of which 

 appears throughout. We know well enough now that 

 the Cuckoo does not change into a Merlin, but migrates 

 in autumn to the southern regions of Africa; but this 

 neither Aristotle nor Pliny could have known, for the 

 common belief in their days was, that a continued pro- 

 gress southwards would bring the traveller to a climate 

 too fierce for the maintenance of animal life. Now the 

 Merlin visits the south of Europe, just at the season 

 when the Cuckoo disappears, and returns northwards to 

 breed in spring, a fact in its history as little known as 

 the migration of the Cuckoo. It bears a certain resem- 

 blance to the Cuckoo, particularly in its barred plumage, 

 certainly a greater one than exists between a caterpillar 

 and a butterfly, so that there were some grounds for 



* Plin. Nat. Hist. lib. x. cap. ix. 



