176 Summer Studies of Birds and Books chap. 



one name. Aristotle's 175 would be a most credit- 

 able proportion for an age when an ornithologist had 

 neither gun to shoot with nor field-glass to spy with. 

 In fact it is interesting to conjecture how he can 

 have contrived to make his list so large. By way 

 of explaining this, I will remind you, in the first 

 place, that birds are more obvious to the unassisted 

 eye than any other animals, because they are always 

 moving about, and attracting our attention by their 

 voices ; secondly, that they — or at least certain kinds 

 of them — have always been of peculiar interest to 

 uneducated people, who imagine them to have some 

 prophetic power, some influence over the fate of 

 human beings. Thus the Eomans were always on 

 the look-out for signs from the birds ; and there are 

 still people who will gravely take off their hats to 

 a Magpie. Those who attend to such things, too, 

 are well aware that the ways of birds are really of 

 some value in warning us of the changes of the 

 weather — Swallows fly low. Gulls come inland, Eooks 

 tower. Pigeons fly wildly about, when a storm is 

 approaching. Virgil tells us of such signs in his 

 first Georgic ; and Virgil himself drew much of this 

 Georgic from a Greek poem by Aratus, the subject 

 of which was the signs of the weather : a poem 

 which contains a great deal of curious lore, and 

 shows, as well as the poetry of a much older Greek, 

 Hesiod the Boeotian, that the Greeks — as well as 



