A MODEL OF GRACEFULNESS. 
213 
be more inappropriate to a great poet. A lively French writer, after 
admitting the vocal deficiency of the swan, undertakes the role of her 
advocate against Buffon, who speaks of her as fitted only to grace our 
lakes and streams, and for nothing else. She is no musician, he says ; 
but a bird of special intelligence, understanding thoroughly how to 
combine the useful with the agreeable. Fitted, he continues, for a 
much higher purpose than the mere embellishment of our private and 
public gardens. Her mission is to destroy all the sources of con- 
tagious infection stored up in the putrefaction of the aquatic plants. 
She is one of Nature's scavengers. The " born healer " of the malarious 
fever, her mission is to destroy it; or, in popular language, to "stamp it 
out." Place a sufiicient number of swans in a stagnant water thickly 
sown with aquatic plants, and at the end of a few months they will 
have thoroughly cleansed it, and transformed into crystal mirrors its 
turbid and troubled waves. 
The swan, of whom we are here speaking, is the graceful creature, 
with curved neck, swelling bosom, and snow-white plumage, which 
has long been accepted by artists as a model of elegance of form. She 
is a bird of unsullied whiteness, black only about the bill, feet, and 
eyes. Her average weight is about twenty-five pounds. Her con- 
cave wings, which seem to swell before the wind like the sails of ;v 
ship, measure upwards of six feet from tip to tip. The long undulat- 
ing neck, which has suggested to poets a complimentary image of 
female loveliness — the mistress of Harold the Saxon was called Edith 
Swanneshad, or the Swan-necked — rounds into a supple serpentine 
curve. Her well-proportioned bill unites all the conditions of elegance, 
dexterity, strength. The mandibles are armed with trenchant saws, 
the upper terminating in a solid horny tip. 
Australia, where things vegetable and animal seem to have been 
designed on diametrically opposite principles to those obtaining in 
other parts of the world, has its black swans, and Iceland has its 
yellow-billed swans. The species, however, are not numerous, though 
they are very widely distributed. 
The swan does not live on fish, properly speaking, and does not 
dive like the duck ; facts which have reasonably led our naturalists to 
14 A 
