516 CLASS AVES. 



quantity of accumulated bones, instances these bones as the 

 remains of reptiles destroyed by the ibis, when they were on 

 the point of entering Egypt, it is merely a simple opinion 

 which he gives upon a fact, which could not have originated 

 from any such cause. These immense debris of fishes and 

 other vertebrated animals, which, in the course of time, have 

 been heaped up in some narrow place, afterwards abandoned 

 by the waters, cannot possibly admit of such an explication 

 of their origin, which is truly ludicrous, and could only have 

 been adopted by this author, in consequence of the excessive 

 credulity with which he was prone to swallow popular report. 

 Such masses, moreover, would not have been preserved for 

 any great length of time, had they consisted merely of the 

 small bones of reptiles, incapable of making resistance against 

 the attacks of birds so weak as the ibis. 



We must, then, look for other reasons than the destruction 

 of serpents, for the veneration paid to the ibis by the ancient 

 Egyptians, who admitted it even into their temples, and pro- 

 hibited the killing of it, under pain of death. In a country, 

 where the people, very ignorant, were governed only by 

 superstitious ideas, it was natural that fictions should have 

 been imagined, to express with energy the happy influences 

 of that phenomenon which every year attracts the ibis into 

 Egypt, and retains it there. Its constant presence at the 

 epoch of that inundation, which annually triumphs over all 

 the sources of decay, and assures the fertility of the soil, must 

 have appeared to the priests and the persons at the bead of 

 government admirably calculated to make a lively impression 

 on the minds of the people, to lead them to suppose super- 

 natural and secret relations between the movements of the 

 Nile and the sojourn of these inoffensive birds, and to con- 

 sider the latter as the cause of effects exclusively owing to 

 the overflow of the river. 



Besides the white and black ibis, another ibis, entirely 



