§26 JO UENAL, BOMB A Y NA TUBAL HISTOR Y SOCIETY, Vol X. 



It is indeed just possible that the word decipit in the second line 

 may refer to the use of a captive hawk as a decoy ; and that the 

 Thracian proceedings may have been of the same nature. But this 

 involves a straining of the original in all the four writers quoted. 

 Martial cannot have learnt his falconry in Italy, or Pliny and ^lian, 

 both Italians and long resident there, would have known more about 

 it than he. His story is quite independent of Aristotle's, and he does 

 not seem to have travelled in any countries but Italy and his native 

 Spain. 



We have no reason to suppose that ^lian was ever in Spain. Pliny 

 was, as a busy public officer (Procurator) in A.D. 71, 72, thirty years 

 before the publication of Martial's epigram. 



This, then, is the first clear evidence of the use of captured hawks 

 by man, as known to a civilized gentleman ; and it occurs in Spain, 

 where the two best naturalists in the Roman Empire had apparently no 

 knowledge of the subject beyond what Aristotle had heard over 400 

 years earlier. 



It is not easy to prove a negative, but, if falconry had been well 

 known to the Assyrians or Egyptians, whose civilization was by no 

 means inconsistent with it, we should surely have had some notice of 

 it from some of the Greek or Roman writers beyond four authorities, 

 reducible to two, referring to European countries only. The obser- 

 vant Herodotus, the sportsman Xenophon, Aristotle's correspondents 

 with Alexander's army, and the thousand educated Greeks and Romans 

 to whom Mesopota:oia was for centuries as well known as India was to 

 us in the last century, would surely have formed and recorded some 

 impression of so fascinating a subject. 



There is, of course, a Chinese claim, as there is to the first invention 

 of everything. Nobody but a Sinologist can judge of its value ; 

 but, among them, there seems to be a tendency to treat Chinese au- 

 thority older than the Greek with diminishing reverence. No form of 

 early Japanese civilization is likely to have anticipated Chinese editions 

 of the same matter. From America, from Australasia, from the 

 negroes of Africa, we seem to have no evidence of native falconry. 



