VII 



Aristotle on Birds 201 



buildings great temples, for example there were as 

 yet but few. 



Four centuries later the Eoman Pliny wrote his 

 voluminous Natural History, and in treating of 

 birds copied freely from Aristotle. But I find that 

 after describing the Swallow he adds a morsel of 

 information of his own. " There is another bird of 

 this kind," he says, " which builds its nest now and 

 then (raro) in houses " ; and he goes on to describe 

 a nest, which seems to be the House - martin's. 1 

 Pliny then knew the bird, and knew that it occa- 

 sionally nested in houses ; and we are justified in 

 inferring that it began to change its habit somewhere 

 between the time of Aristotle and Pliny, and prob- 

 ably not long before the Christian era. Note that 

 this was the very time at which that change in 

 architecture was going on in Greece and Italy, which 

 we have seen on a small scale at Meiringen. In the 

 place of the small and rude houses of mud or wood, 



mention that he had got almost as far as Gilbert White in his 

 knowledge of the way in which the excreta of the young birds are 

 disposed of. Cp. Nat. Hist, of Selborne, Letter 55. 



1 H. N. x. 42. Pliny has somewhat exaggerated the form of 

 the nest " totos supinos (i.e. nidos), faucibus porrectis in 

 angustum, utero capaci." This description would, indeed, agree 

 even better with that of the nest of the Rufous Swallow (H. 

 rufula; see Ibis, vol. ii. p. 386), which makes a long funnel-shaped 

 entrance to its nest. But I cannot find that this bird ever builds 

 on human habitations. If this were so, we might identify it with 

 Pliny's bird, and my argument about the House-martin would so 

 far be invalidated. 



