The Zoologist— April, 1808. 1173 



the frozen region of hell to this clattering noise of the stork ('Inferno,' 

 xxxii): — 



"These wretched spirits, fixed within the ice 



Tremhle, with sound pf chattering teeth that seems 



Like the stork's note." 



Among the ancients the stork was the emblem of chastity and gratitude, 

 and it is a protected favourite in most lands to this day. I remember 

 once hearing a German clergyman roundly abused by a party of his 

 brethren for having driven the storks from his house ; they were the 

 only pair in the neighbourhood, and all agreed that he was " no good 

 Christian " thus to molest them. Many strange stories are told by old 

 writers of this bird; .Elian relates how one which had broken its leg 

 was succoured by a poor widow of Tarentum, and how next season it 

 brought her a huge diamond from foreign lands. Oppian tells us of a 

 pair of storks that were persecuted by a serpent, until they brought a 

 strange bird with them from abroad, who slew the reptile with its 

 sword-like beak, but was poisoned in the conflict and lost all its 

 feathers, when the grateful storks fed and tended their ally till it was 

 recovered. The old birds were said to be carefully fed by their young, 

 whence the Lex Pelargica (from " pelargos," a stork) which inculcated 

 similiar piety in another species. Aldrovandus says that storks will 

 not live in Thuringia because no tithes are paid there, and they were 

 affirmed to confine themselves to free states and republics, which, how- 

 ever, is said by Sir Thomas Browne to be merely, " a pretty conceit 

 to advance the opinion of popular policies." 



Curlew. — This bird, with its weird and melancholy note and haunts, 

 has naturally excited superstitious feeling ; hence in Scotland its name 

 of " whaup" is also applied to a long-nosed goblin, peculiar, I believe, 

 to that country, and it is to this that Sir Walter Scott alludes, as Yarrell 

 has noted, when he speaks in the ' Black Dwarf of " worricows and 

 lang-nebbit things aboot the land." The note of the curlew heard by 

 night is also dreaded by the Channel fishermen, who term the sound 

 "the Seven Whistlers." Mr. F. T. Buckland, in his 'Curiosities 

 of Natural History' (Second Series, p. 286), quotes an old man 

 at Folkestone who said to him : — " I never thinks any good of 

 them, there's always an accident when they comes. I heard 'em once 

 one dark night last winter. They come over our heads all of a sudden, 

 singing ' ewe, ewe,' and the men in the boat wanted to go back. It 

 came on to rain and blow soon afterwards, and was an awful night, sir; 

 and sure enough before morning a boat was upset and seven poor 



