GLOSSY IBIS. 423 
these learned men (notwithstanding that Herodotus relates 
his seeing heaps of their bones or spines) believe for an 
instant in the existence of these winged serpents? and why 
try to reconcile truth with a barefaced falsehood, or with 
expressions manifestly figurative 2 We are aware that some 
modern translators of Herodotus, by forcing the Greek original 
to meet their own views, have attempted to write, instead of 
winged serpents, the word locustew, which insects are known 
to come in vast swarms, causing periodically great devastation 
even in some parts of Hurope. But nothing is gained by this 
plausible and apparently learned supposition, since the confor- 
mation of the ibis would prevent it from making any havoc 
among these enemies, whose being winged would not, moreover, 
save their author from the difficulty, locusts having certainly 
neither bones nor spines. The figure intended is still plainer, 
and Savigny, who first pointed it out, could in my opinion 
have saved himself many a page of his classical dissertation, 
and without any recourse to the idea of the Cerastes, for to 
me it is evident that by the winged serpents were originally 
signified the exhalations from the marshes, so noxious in 
Keypt when brought by the south-easterly or. Typhonian 
winds, against which the ibis was observed to direct its flight 
and to conquer, aided, it is true, by the powerful sweeping 
Lthervan winds. 
Be this as it may, no animal was more venerated by the 
Hgyptians than the ibis: there was none whose history was 
more encumbered with fictions. Notwithstanding the ridicule 
thrown upon it by Aristotle, the ibis was believed to be so 
essentially pure and chaste, as to be incapable of any immodest 
act. The priests declared the water to be only fit for ablutions 
and religious purposes when the ibis had deigned to drink of 
it. Yet by some unaccountable contradiction Roman authors 
made of it an unclean animal. It is needless here to repeat 
all the fanciful and extravagant things said of the ibis among 
a people whose credulity, superstition, and wildness of imagin- 
ation knew no bounds. It was represented by the priests as 
