51 S CLASS AVES. 



taken were kept for some time in small separate aviaries ; and 

 the better to accustom them to captivity, they were given as 

 companions those who had been already habituated to their 

 prison. 



The Roman poets mention these thrushes in many places. 

 Horace declares a tlirush to be a very appropriate present from 

 a legacy hunter to a rich old man : 



" —Tardus, 

 Sive aliud privum dabitur tibi ; devolet illuc 

 Res ubi magna nitet domino sene." 



Again he puts the praises of a thrush into the mouth of a 

 gormandizing spendthrift. 



" Cum sit obeso 

 Nil melius turdo." 



And Martial gives it the first rank among esculent birds, as 

 he does to the hare among quadrupeds. 



" Inter aves tardus, si quis me judice certet. 

 Inter quadrupedes gloria prima lepus ?" 



The fieldfare and the redwing are generally supposed to be 

 the Turdi of the Roman writers. 



On the approach of vintage time innumerable flocks of 

 thrushes quit the northern regions of Lapland and Siberia, 

 and their abundance is so great on the southern coast of the 

 Baltic, that Klein assures us that the city of Dantzic alone 

 consumes every year eighty thousand pairs of them. The dif- 

 ferent species do not all arrive at the same time. The thrushes 

 proper, or the song-thrushes, make their appearance first, then 

 come the redwings, and finally the fieldfares and missels. They 

 stop in various places, especially where they find the most 

 abundant food, and the most easily obtained. They thus con- 

 tinue their route southward, arrive in certain countries sooner 

 or later, in greater or less numbers according to the direction of 

 the winds and the changes of temperature. This is universally 



