ON THE IBIS. 325 



to preponderate over accounts of habits too often 

 imagined without any other motive than to jus- 

 tify the different worships rendered to animals. 

 It might be added, the serpents from which the 

 ibis delivered Egypt, are represented to us as very 

 venomous, but not as very large. I have even 

 obtained a direct proof that the birds preserved 

 as mummies, which have had a beak precisely si- 

 milar to that of our bird, were true serpent eat- 

 ers ; for I found in one of their mummies the still 

 undigested remains of the skin and scales of ser- 

 pents, which I have deposited in our anatomical 

 galleries. 



But, at the present day, M. Savigny, who has 

 observed, in a living state, and more than once 

 dissected our white numenius, the bird which 

 every thing concurs to prove to have been the 

 ibis, asserts that it only eats worms, fresh water 

 shells, and other small animals of that sort. Sup- 

 posing this fact to have no exception, all that 

 can be concluded from it is, that the Egyptians, 

 as has happened more than once to them and 

 others, had invented a false reason for an absurd 

 worship. It is true that Herodotus says, he saw, 

 in a place on the borders of the desert *, near 



* Euterpe, cap. Ixxv. Herodotus says a place in Arabia, 

 but it is not seen how a place in Arabia could have been 

 near the city of Buto, which was in the western part of the 

 Delta. 



