Chap. 3.] 
EAGLES. 
481 
then a new cycle comes round again with the same characte- 
ristics as the former one, in the seasons and the appearance of 
the stars ; and he says that this begins about mid- day of the 
day on which the sun enters the sign of Aries. He also tells 
us that when he wrote to the above effect, in the consulship 
of P. Licinius and Cneius Cornelius, it was the two hundred 
and fifteenth year of the said revolution. Cornelius Valerianus 
says that the phoenix took its flight from Arabia into Egypt 
in the consulship of Q. Plautius and Sextus Papinius. This 
bird was brought to Eome in the censorship of the Emperor 
Claudius, being the year from the building of the City, 800, 
and it was exposed to public view in the Comitium.^'^ This 
fact is attested by the public Annals, but there is no one that 
doubts that it was a fictitious phoenix only. 
CHAP. 3. (3.) THE DIEFEEENT KINDS OF EAGLES. 
Of all the birds with which we are acquainted, the eagle is 
looked upon as the most noble, and the most remarkable for 
its strength. There are six^® different kinds; the one called 
*'melanaetos"^^ by the Greeks, and Valeria" in our language, 
ration of all things at the moment at which the planets and the stars would 
return to the same primitive situation with regard to the ecliptic, or in 
other words, they conceived an immense period, which would include one 
or more complete revolutions of each of the planets. All these periods 
were called the * great year,' or the ^ great revolution.' " Mistoire de 
V Astronomie Ancienne. 
1^ A.u.c. 657. 16 A.r.c. 789. 
A public ^place in the Forum, where the comitia curiata were held, 
and certain offences tried and punished. 
IS Cuvier remarks, that this passage is borrowed, with some changes, 
from Aristotle's " History of Animals," B. ix. c. 32, but that the account given 
by Pliny is not very easily explained, from the fact that the word eagle is 
not used by him in a rigorous acceptation of the word. Indeed it is only 
at the present day that any accurate knowledge has been obtained as to 
the different species of eagles, and the changes of colour to which they 
are subject with the advance of age ; circumstances which have caused the 
species of them to be multiplied by naturalists. It is very doubtful, 
he says, whether Aristotle has distinguished the various kinds any better 
than Pliny ; although Buffon, who himself was not very successful in 
distinguishing them, says that Aristotle understood more on the subject 
than the moderns. 
19 MtXavaiTog^ or the black eagle.'* Cuvier says, that this description 
is copied exactly from Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. ix. c. 32. This eagle, he 
says, cannot be, as is commonly supposed, the common eagle." It can 
only be, he thinks, the "small eagle, the female of which, according to 
VOL. n. II 
