On the Popular Weather Prognostics of Scotland. 217 
yet associated with others, it may give strength, and the 
whole may be safely trusted in determining a debated course 
of action. Thus, the continued and distressed screaming 
of the peacock arrests the farmer’s attention, and the first 
thing to which this leads is to his looking around for other 
signs, and he acts according to what he believes to be the 
teaching of the whole. I have said that he acts on this 
teaching, and this leads me incidentally to remark, that it 
is the fact that important operations are every day actually 
determined by such indications, which makes it so desirable 
to have the false separated from the true, so that the 
shepherd, the farmer, and the sailor, may trust only to 
prognostics which are ratified by experience, and, when 
possible, grounded on reason. 
The great antiquity of many of these weather proverbs is 
also a substantial argument against hastily dismissing them. 
Peculiarities in the flight and conduct of birds have been 
held to foretell approaching change of weather for thousands 
of years. We might suspect this to be a mere extension of 
the drawing of auguries from them. The victory at Arte- 
mesium was assured to Themistocles by the crowing of a 
cock. Indeed, ornithomancy was an actual science among 
the early Greeks. . But this doubt as to the origin of such 
weather prognostics is removed by the manner in which 
Virgil handles them. In his allusions there is nothing of 
the supernatural or mysterious. He speaks of them as 
simple deductions from the experience or observation of 
those whose occupations led to the looking for signs of 
coming storms. It is true, they may now be called tradi- 
tional, but as every generation has had the opportunity of 
testing their accuracy and value, unless they had been 
found to contain some measure of truth they would soon 
have ceased to be handed down. It must not be forgotten 
that they regulate affairs of every-day life, and lead to loss 
or gain—a test which soon deprives traditional error of its 
vitality ; and this is only a little less slowly its fate when it 
is linked to or mixed up with religious belief. 
So it is with that class of prognostics to which St Swithen’s 
day belongs. In Scotland, at the present time, there is 
practically no faith placed in them. Except St Swithen’s 
