254 Union Bay 



so that for centuries Aristotle was the great authority on the 

 subjects about which he wrote. And this in spite of state- 

 ments such as these: injured wild boars hunt a plant called 

 dittany to eject arrows from the body, the weasel eats wild 

 rice before fighting the snake, a stag wounded by a venom- 

 ous snake gathers crabs and eats them. 



Four hundred years later, Pliny the Elder, a Roman, re- 

 ferred to swallows in the chapters on birds in his Natural 

 History. Much seemed to be a rehash of Aristotle with the 

 addition of some of the popular beliefs of the period. The 

 swallow, he wrote, would not enter a house in Thebes, be- 

 cause the city had been so often captured, nor would it ap- 

 proach the country of the Bizyae because of the crimes that 

 had been committed there. Certain of the Romans used the 

 swallows as messengers of victory or for carrying other news. 

 In Egypt, the swallows yearly strengthened with chaff and 

 straw the shore of an island sacred to Isis and thus prevented 

 the annual floods from destroying it. This task was of such 

 magnitude that it required three days labor and so difficult 

 that it resulted in the death of many of the birds. These 

 stories are of the "It is said" variety so that it is difficult to 

 know whether the writer actually believed them or whether 

 they were thrown in as a stimulant to the reader. 



The swallows must have been known to all. The Bible 

 speaks of them. The Psalms say "Yea, the sparrow hath found 

 an house, and the swallow a nest for herself. . . ." Hezekiah, 

 King of Judah, recovered of his illness, wrote, "Like a crane 

 or a swallow, so did I chatter." The poets did not neglect 

 them: Chaucer confirmed the bird's chattering mentioned 

 in the Bible with the following: "As any swalwe chitteryng 

 on a berne." Elsewhere he refers to "The swalow, mortrer 

 [murderer] of the flyes smale," and "The swalwe Proigne, 

 with a sorwful lay." Shakespeare asks the following question: 

 "Do you think me a swallow, an arrow or a bullet?" and else- 

 where remarks : "True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's 



