82 ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS. 



inundated lands. Perrault first introduced the erro- 

 neous notion that the Ibis of antiquity was a species 

 of Tantalus, in which he was followed implicitly by 

 naturalists throughout the whole of the last century. 

 Brisson, Buffon, Linnseus, and Latham, all united to 

 give it currency; and the Tantalus Ibis of the two latter 

 authors was universally regarded as the sacred bird. 



Our adventurous countryman Bruce was the first to 

 throw a doubt upon the authenticity of this determi- 

 nation, and to point out the identity between the figures 

 represented on the ancient monuments, the mummies 

 preserved in the Egyptian tombs, and a living bird 

 common on the banks of the Nile and known to the 

 Arabs by the name of Abou Hannes. But it was not 

 until after the return of the French expedition from 

 Egypt that the question was definitively settled by a 

 careful anatomical comparison of the ancient mummies 

 and recent specimens then brought home by GeofFroy- 

 Saint-Hilaire and Savigny. From the examination of 

 these materials M. Cuvier was enabled to verify Bruce's 

 assertion, and to restore to science a bird which, after 

 having formed for centuries the object of a nation's 

 adoration, had fallen into oblivion, and was wholly 

 unknown to modern naturalists. At the same time 

 he pointed out those distinctive characters on which 

 M. Lacepede founded the genus Ibis, formally estab- 

 lished by M. Cuvier himself in the first edition of his 

 Regne Animal. 



Although the bird which we have now to describe is 

 a native of the New World it has not been considered 

 by ornithologists as requiring to be generically distin- 

 guished from the Ibis of the ancients. With that and 

 with other species, distributed equally over the Old 

 Continent and in America, it forms part of a group 

 among the Ardeidee characterized by a long and slender 



