1C6 ON THE IBIS. 



If we examine the books of the ancients and their monuments, and 

 compare what they have said concerning the ibis, or the figures they 

 have left of it, with the bird we have just described, we shall find all 

 our difficulties vanish, and all testimonies agree with the best of all, 

 that is, the body of the bird itself, preserved it its mummy state. 



Herodotus says (in his Euterpe, No. 76), " The most common ibises 

 have the head and front of the neck denuded, the plumage white, ex- 

 cept on the head, on the nape of the neck, the ends of the wings, and 

 the rump, which are black. The beak and feet resemble those of the 

 other ibises;" and he had said of these " They are of the size of the 

 crow, of an entirely black colour, and have feet like those of the crane, 

 with a crooked beak." 



How does it occur that the travellers of modern days do not give 

 us descriptions of birds as accurate as that which Herodotus has made 

 of the ibis ? 



How can this description be applied to a bird which has only the 

 face denuded, and of a red colour, to a bird which has the rump white, 

 and not covered as ours by the black feathers of its wings ? 



And yet the last characteristic was essential to the ibis. Plutarch 

 says (de Iside et Osiride), that the form of a lunar crescent was to be 

 found in the manner in which the white was cut by the black in the 

 plumage of this bird. It was, in fact, by the union of the black of 

 these latter wing-feathers with that of the two extremities of the 

 wings, that there is formed in the white a large semicircular indention 

 which gives to the white the appearance of a crescent. 



It is now difficult to explain what he meant, by saying that the feet 

 of the ibis formed an equilateral triangle with its beak. But we can 

 understand the assertion of ^Elian, that when it draws back its head 

 and neck into its feathers, it has something of the appearance of a 

 heart *. It was thence, according to Horus Apollo (c. 35), made the 

 emblem of the human heart. 



According to what Herodotus says of the nudity of the throat, and 

 of the feathers which covered the upper part of the neck, he seems to 

 have had in his eye an individual of a middle age, but it is no less 

 certain that the Egyptians knew also very well those individuals with 

 the neck entirely denuded. We see such represented from sculptures 

 of bronze in the collection of Egyptian antiquities of Caylus (vol. i, pi. 

 10, No. 4 ; and vol. v, pi. 11, No. 1). This latter figure so much re- 

 sembles the bird given in pi. 5, that we may think it wa3 taken from it. 



* .<Elian, lib. x, cap. xxix. 



