70 The Birds of the Assyrian Monuments and Records. 
damna canens," come at once to the memory. The very fact 
of the occasional appearance of this funereal bird — generally 
a lover of secluded localities — in the neighbourhood of cities, 
increased the impending calamity, as Pliny says, "Noctis 
monstrum nec cantu aliquo vocalis, sed gemitu. Itaque in 
urbibus aut omnino in luce visus, dirum ostentum est." (Nat. 
Hist. x. 12.) Similarly Shakspeare and other poets allude to 
the owl as a bird of evil : 
" Out on ye, owls, nothing but songs of death." 
To the red Indian of America the Virginian horned owl is 
equally a source of superstitious terror. But notwithstanding 
all the prevalent superstition concerning owls, these birds 
had their bright side, as we have seen, and one small species 
was sacred to Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and its night- 
tlight was a good sign to the Athenians that the goddess pro- 
tected their city. We need therefore not be surprised to find in 
the Assyrian records the same bird designated as " prince " 
or "pilot " on the one side, and "bird of evil " on the other. 1 
Another name, dulimmassat ^|>- Jf- V")? repre- 
sented by the Accadian sib-tir-ra, " the jungle shepherd-bird" 
(S^ISI ^^TYTT E^-TT)' * s ' ^ think, meant for a woodpecker. 
The Accadian name, " shepherd-bird of the jungle, or planta- 
tion," may, without any stretch of the imagination, allude to 
woodpeckers, which the shepherd, in his wanderings among 
the jungles, interspersed with beautiful glades, or grassy pas- 
turages, might often have observed. The Picus syriacus, 
which is the Asiatic representative of our larger pied wood- 
pecker (P. major), would well suit this description, though of 
course other birds of this genus having like habits would 
doubtless be included in the names given above. 
1 I have purposely dwelt on this marked recognition in zoological mytho- 
logy of a two-fold phase, implying opposite characters in the same creature, 
because in the discussion that followed the reading of my paper, it was thought 
by some of the Members present that where birds or other animals are mentioned 
in incantations or mythical legends, all attempts at identification are futile : as 
if all natural history, in the popular sense of the term, whether among the ancients 
or the moderns, was not mixed up with fact and fiction! The presence of 
legend does not preclude that of fact; indeed, legend would often not exist 
without fact. The natural history fact -characteristics of the great owl, for 
instance, have created the superstitious with regard to the "direful bird of the 
unmentionable goddess," and help to explain them. 
