A04 Miscellanies. . 
cloth and an old shoe. That these nests had been but recently con- 
structed was sufficiently evident from the shoe and watch of the ship- 
wrecked pilgrim, whose tattered clothes and whitened bones were found 
at no great distance; but of what genus or species had been the archi- 
tect and occupant of the structure Mr. Burton could not, from his own 
observation, determine. From the accounts of the Arabs, however, 
it was presumed that these nests had been occupied by remarkably large 
birds of the stork kind, which had deserted the coast but a short time 
previous to Mr. Burton’s visit. To these facts, said Mr. Bonomi, I beg 
to add ‘the following remarks :—Among the most ancient records of 
the primeval civilization of the human race that have come down to 
us, there is described, in the language the most universally intelligible, 
a gigantic stork bearing, with respect to a man of ordinary dimensions, 
the proportions exhibited in the drawing before you, which is faithfully 
copied from the original document. It is a bird of white plumage, 
straight and large beak, long feathers in the tail; the mail bird has a 
tuft at the back of the head, and another at the breast: its habits appa- 
rently gregarious. This very remarkable painted basso-relievo is sculp- 
tured on the wall, in the tomb of an officer of the household of Pha- 
raoh Shufu, (the Suphis of the Greeks,) a monarch of the fourth 
dynasty, who reigned over Egypt, while yet a great part of the Delta 
was intersected by lakes overgrown with the papyrus,—while yet the 
smaller ramifications of the parent stream were inhabited by the croco- 
dile and hippopotamos,—while yet, as it would seem, that favored land 
had not been visited by calamity, nor the arts of peace disturbed by 
war, so the sculpture in these tombs intimate, for there is neither horse 
nor instrument of war in any one of these tombs. At that period, the 
period of the building of the great pyramid, which, according to some 
writers on Egyptian matters, was in the year 2100 B..c., which, on 
good authority, is the 240th year of the deluge, this gigantic stork was 
an inhabitant of the Delta, or its immediate vicinity ; for, as these very 
interesting documents relate, it was occasionally entrapped by the 
peasantry of the Delta, and brought with other wild animals, as 
matters of curiosity to the great landholders or farmers of the pro- 
ducts of the Nile,—of which circumstance this painted sculpture is a 
representation, the catching of fish and birds, which in those days occu- 
pied a large portion of the inhabitants. The birds and fish were salted. 
That this document gives no exaggerated account of the bird may be 
presumed from the just proportion that the quadrupeds, in the same pic- 
ture, bear to the men who are leading them ; and, from the absence of 
any representation of these birds in the less ancient monuments of 
Egypt, it may also be reasonably conjectured they disappeared soon 
