GLOSSY IBIS. 
27 
instruments for the purpose, such a strong bill,) by Pliny and 
others, and credited in our days to a certain extent by Buffon, who 
thus accounted for the divine honours it*received. I allude to the 
story of their attacking and destroying periodically on the limits of 
civilization immense flocks of small but most pernicious winged 
serpents generated by the fermentation of marshes, which without 
the generous protection afforded by the Ibis would cause the utter 
ruin of Egypt. 
Still more unaccountable is it that naturalists and philosophers 
should have been so long in finding out the true meaning of this 
oriental figure. How could the Ibis with its feeble bill, whose 
pressure can be hardly felt on the most delicate finger, and which 
is only calculated for probing in the mud after small mollusca and 
worms in places just left bare after an inundation, how could 
such a weapon cut to pieces and destroy so many monsters if they 
had existed. How could these learned men (notwithstanding that 
Herodotus relates his seeing heaps of their bones or spines,) 
believe for an instant in the existence of these winged serpents ; 
and why try to reconcile truth with a barefaced falsehood, or 
with expressions manifestly figurative. We are aware that some 
modern translators of Herodotus, by forcing the Greek original to 
meet their own views, have attempted to write instead of winged 
serpents, the word locustse, which insects are known to come in vast 
swarms, causing periodically great devastation even in some parts 
of Europe. But nothing is gained by this plausible and apparently 
learned supposition, since the conformation of the Ibis would 
prevent it from making any havoc among these enemies, whose 
being winged would not moreover save their author from the 
difficulty, locusts having certainly neither bones nor spines. The 
figure intended is still plainer, and Savigny, who first pointed 
it out, could in my opinion have saved himself many a page of his 
classical dissertation, and without any recourse to the idea of the 
