190 
The Animal-Lore of Shalcspeare's Time . 
to be destitute of these appendages. Navarette, a mis¬ 
sionary to China, about 1670, writes :— 
“ The bird of paradise has neither feet nor wings; I have often 
viewed them carefully, but could never find any sign of feet, that they 
have not wings is more visible to every body. The beak is somewhat 
thick and large, fit to catch gnats, which is their food. They never 
light nor can they rest upon the ground, as may be easily conceived 
as they have no feet. Their fixed abode is the region of the air, for 
which reason they are called birds of paradise. They alight upon trees 
and by the help of the wind they fly from one to another, making use 
of their sightly tail. If the wind fails they presently fall, and their 
bill being heavy it is the first which lights upon the sand, where it 
sticks so that they cannot stir but are taken with ease.” ( Churchill's 
Voyages , vol. i. p. 41.) 
Wonders like these lose nothing when transmitted by 
poets. Accordingly we find, in that storehouse of natural- 
history marvels, Du Bartas’s Divine Weekes and Works 
(p. 45), a still more astonishing account of the habits of 
the Bird of Paradise:— 
“But note we nowe, towards the rich Moluques, 
Those passing strange and wondrous birds mamuques: 
Wondrous, indeed, if sea, or earth, or sky, 
Saw ever wonder swim, or go, or fly, 
None knowes their nest, none knowes the dam that breeds them: 
Food-less they live; for th* aire alonely feeds them : 
Wing-less they fly; and yet their flight extends, 
Till with their flight, their unknow’n lives-date ends.” 
The belief in the absence of wings and legs is easily 
explained by the fact that the natives, when they pre¬ 
pared the birds for exportation, removed these members 
as likely to interfere with the beauty of the specimens. 
These early writers surmounted the difficulty as to the 
nests and parentage of these birds by the suggestion that 
the female laid her eggs on the back of the male, and 
hatched them as they floated through the air in their 
endless flight. This explanation is met with in an 
account of the Bird of Paradise given by the learned 
