150 SCRIPTURE NATURAL HISTORY. 



said to point her hostility, with particular virulence, against the poor 

 and destitute stranger that happens to come in her way. Not sat- 

 isfied with endeavoring to push him down by running furiously 

 upon him, she will not cease to peck at him violently with her bill, 

 and to strike at him with her feet, and will sometime's inflict a very 

 serious wound. The dispositions and behavior of Job's friends 

 and domestics were equally vexatious and afflicting; and how 

 much reason he had to complain, will appear from the following 

 statement : 'They that dwell in mine house, and my maidens, count 

 me for a stranger ; I am an alien in their sight. I called my ser- 

 vant, and he gave me no answer ; my breath is strange to my wife, 

 though I entreated for the children's sake of mine own body ; yea, 

 young children despised me, all my inward friends abhorred "me. 

 Upon my right hand rise the youth ; they push away my feet, and 

 they raise up against me the ways of their destruction. They mar 

 rny path, they set forward my calamity, they have no helper, "They 

 come upon me as a wide breaking in of waters, in the desolation 

 they roli themselves upon me,' ch. xxx. 12 J4. 



There is a very correct and poetical description of the ostrich, in 

 the thirty-ninth chapter of the book of Job. 



Our translators appear to have been influenced by the vulgar er- 

 ror, that the ostrich did not herself hatch her eggs by sitting on 

 them, but left them to the heat of the sun. This, however, is not 

 the fact. She usually sits upon her eggs as other birds do ; but 

 then she so often wanders, and so far in search of food, that fre- 

 quently the eggs are addle, by means of her long absence from 

 them. To this we may add, that when she has left her nest, wheth- 

 er through fear or to seek food, if she light upon the eggs of some 

 other ostrich, she sits upon them, and is unmindful of her own. 



* On the least noise or trivial occasion,' says doctor Shaw, ' she 

 forsakes her eggs, or her young ones, to which, perhaps, she never 

 returns ; or if she does, it may be too Jate either to restore life to the 

 one, or to preserve the lives of the others. Agreeable to this ac- 

 count, the Arabs meet sometimes with whole nests of these eggs 

 undisturbed ; some of them are sweet and good, others are addle 

 and corrupted; others, again, have their young ones of different 

 growth, according to the time, it may be presumed, they may have 

 been forsaken of the dam. They often meet with a few of the little 

 ones no bigger than well-grown pullets, half starved, straggling and 

 inoaning about, like so many distressed orphans for their mother. 

 In this manner the ostrich may he said to be hardened against her 

 young ones, as though they were not her's ; her labor, in hatching and 

 Attending them so lar, fcemg vain, without fear, or the least concern 

 of what becomes of them afterwards. This want of affection is al- 

 so recorded in Lam. iv. 3. " The daughter of my people is become 

 cruel, Jijie ostriches of the wilderness ; " that is by apparently de- 

 asrting their own, and receiving others in return. Hence, one of 

 the great -causes of lamentation was, the coming in of strangers and 

 enemies iuto Zion, and possessing it. Thus, in the twelfth verse 



