DIFFICTTLTIES OF NOMENCLATUEE. Ill 



delusions which were the common property of the age. If, for 

 example, he tells us in the fourth Georgic that bees 



oft weigh up tiny stones 

 As light craft ballast in the tossing tide, 

 Wherewith they poise them through the cloudy vast : 



let us remember that the true history of bees has been matter 

 of quite recent discovery. And we may note at the same time 

 that Pliny, a professed naturalist, living at least a generation 

 after Virgil, has actually asserted that cranes, when flying 

 against the wind, will take up stones with their feet, and stuff 

 their long throats full of gravel, which they discharge when 

 they alight safely on the ground ! 



Virgil mentions about twenty kinds of birds, most of them 

 several times. These twenty kinds do not correspond so much 

 to our species as to our genera ; for the Greeks and Romans, I 

 need hardly say, had only very rough-and-ready methods of 

 classification, just as is the case with uneducated people at the 

 present day. When they found birds tolerably like each other, 

 they readily put them down as of the same Knd, rarely marking 

 minor differences. Thus corvus appears to stand for both crow 

 and rook ; picus stands for all the woodpeckers inhabiting Italy; 

 by accipiter may be understood any kind of hawk. But in spite 

 of this difficulty, it is sometimes possible to make out the 

 particular species which is alluded to, partly by getting inform- 

 ation as to those which are found in Italy at the present day, 

 partly by comparing Virgil with Pliny and other Koman writers, 

 and where Virgil is using a Greek original, by trying to discover, 

 chiefly through Aristotle's admirable book on natural history, 

 what bird is indicated by the Greek word translated, and 



