
170 BITTERNS. 
ceived are nearly all from the same characteristic: these are 
Stake-driver, applied to our own bird, and Mire-drum, Bull 
of the Bog, Butter-bump and Bog-blutter (7. e., bleater), ap- 
plied to the European species. 
Australia is a land of anomalies; a kingfisher lives there 
which avoids the water, dwells in arid wastes, living on 
lizards and snakes, and has his home in a tree; and possibly 
some unknown species of bittern may belong there which 
flutters about the upland fields and lives on seeds, and will 
be held in high repute as a warbler when he shall, hereafter, 
be found, and will be kept in a gilded cage with a cuttle-fish 
bone. That would indeed be a sight worth going half-way, 
around the world to see. I dare prophesy, however, that 
that island’s vast unknown interior will produce no such 
wonder, but that all unknown bitterns will be found to agree 
in character with the known. What that character is, how 
it differs from our supposed songster, let us now consider. 
The prophets use its name in foretelling desolation. Says 
Isaiah, of Babylon, "I will make it a possession for the bit- 
tern ;” and Zephaniah says of Ninevah, "The cormorant and 
the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it.” Hear also 
what Mudie, who was not a prophet, says of the European 
species. “It hears not the whistle of the ploughman not 
the sound of the mattock; and the tinkle of the sheep bell 
or the lowing of the ox (although the latter bears so much 
resemblance to its hollow and dismal voice that it has given 
foundation for the name) is a signal for it to be gone. Places 
which scatter blight and giler over every herb more deli- 
cate than a sias: ; which are the pasture of those loathsome 
things which wriggle in the ooze, or crawl and swim in the 
putrid and mantling waters; places which shed murrain over 
the quadrupeds, or “chills which eat the tlesh off their bones; 
places from which even the raven, lover of disease and bat- 
tener upon all that expires miserably and exhausted, keeps 
aloof (for ‘the reek o' the rotten fen’ is loathsome even to 
him), are the chosen habitation, the only loved home of the 





