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The Queensland Naturalist August 1947 
and conveyed it to her sister, who hastened to release her. 
She then plotted as to the best means of punishing her 
husband. Jt was the time of the orgies of Bacchus, and 
Proene murdered her six-year-old sou, Itylus, and served 
him up as food to her husband at tbe festival. During 
the feast, Tereus called for his son, whereupon his dutiful 
spouse informed him that he was at that very moment 
eating him, and Philomela produced the head of Itylus as 
proof. Tereus drew his sword to stab them to the heart, 
but straightway he was changed into a hoopoe, Philomela 
into a nightingale, Proene into a swallow and Itylus into 
a pheasant. 
The poets being versed in the classics, sing the praises 
of the sang of the nightingale with great gusto, constantly 
referring to the bird in the feminine gender: 
“The love-lorn nightingale 
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well” 
for instance; whereas the cold truth is that only the male 
bird sings. And what a lovely picture it is — not of Philo- 
mela bemoaning her fate — but of the male bird singing to 
his mate as she sits on her eggs. So enraptured are the 
poets with the fact that the bird sings at night that, they 
omit to mention that it also sings during the day, and 
even seem ignorant of its being a bird of passage. There 
are several smug references to “our nightingale” and 
“old England’s nightingale.” In Milton’s sonnet is a 
further reference to the good fortune consequent on hear- 
ing the nightingale before the cuckoo : 
“Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day, 
First heard before the shallow cuckoo's bill. 
Portend success in love; oh, if Jove's will 
Have linked that amorous power to thy soft lay. 
Now timely sing, e’er the rnde bird of hate 
Foretells my hopeless doom in some grove nigh.’ 
“The rude bird of hate,” of course, is a polite refer- 
ence to the cuckoo. 
In looking through books of folk lore the term 
“vulgar error” is often encountered, and perhaps one of 
the most glaring of these is the statement by so many of 
our writers that the swan sings before he dies. Byron, in 
the Isles of Greece, “There swan-like let me sing and die” ; 
Coleridge, “Swans sing before they die; ’twere no bad 
thing should certaine persons die before they sing.” Mrs. 
Hemans invites us to stand with her among the reeds of 
