12,6 THE BIEDS 0¥ VIEGIL. 



alone ; and though the larger «hough (our Cornish chough) might 

 do so, and is to be found in the mountain districts of Italy, he 

 cannot well be the bird generally unjderstood by comix. Could 

 a chough learn to talk with his long thin red bill ? But Pliny 

 knew of a talking comix ', ' while I was engaged upon this book ' 

 he says, ' there was in Eome a cornix from the south-west of 

 Spain, belonging to a Roman knight, which was of an amazingly 

 pure black, and, could say certain strings of words, to which it 

 frequently added new ones.' 



Swans are frequently mentioned by Virgil, as by other Latin 

 and Greek poets. This splendid bird must have been much 

 commoner then throughout Europe than it is now, and accord- 

 ingly attracted much attention. It doubtless abounded in 

 the swampy localities of the north of Italy, and at the mouths 

 of the great rivers of Thrace and Asia Minor, as well as in the 

 north of Europe, where it came to be woven into many a 

 Teutonic fable. Homer has frequent and beautiful allusions to 

 it ; and the town of Clazomenae, at the mouth of the river 

 Hermus, has a swan stamped upon its coins. 



This Swan of the old poets is without any doubt the whooper 

 {Cycnv/S omisieus) whose voice and presence are still well-known 

 in Italy and Greece. Virgil had seen it at Mantua, on the 

 watery plain of the Mincius : 



Pasoentem niveos lierboso flumine cyonps.' 

 And in an admirable simile in the eleventh book of the Aeneid, 

 he likens the stir and dissension in the camp of Turnus, when 



* Whose weedy water feeds the snow-white swan. Qeorg. ii. 199. 



