28 GLOSSY IBIS. 
i . ■ • , ' • . 
Cerastes, for to me it is evident that by the winged serpents were 
originally signified the exhalations from the marshes, so noxious 
in Egypt when brought by the south-easterly or Typhonian winds, 
against which the Ibis was observed to direct its flight and to 
conquer, aided, it is true, by the powerful sweeping Etherian winds. 
Be this as it may, no animal was more venerated by the 
Egyptians than the Ibis : there was none whose history was more 
encumbered with fictions. Notwithstanding the ridicule thrown * 
upon it by Aristotle, the Ibis was believed to be so essentially 
pure and chaste, as to be incapable of any immodest act. The 
priests declared the water to be only fit for ablutions and religious 
• purposes when the Ibis had deigned to drink of it. Yet by 
some unaccountable contradiction Roman authors made of it an 
unclean animal. It is needless here to repeat all the fanciful 
and extravagant things said of the Ibis among a people whose 
credulity, superstition, and wildness of imagination knew no 
bounds. It was represented by the priests as a present from 
Osiris to Isis, or the fertilized soil, and as such was carefully 
brought up in the temples, those first menageries of antiquity. It 
was forbidden under pain of severest punishment to kill or injure 
in the least these sacred beings, and their dead bodies even were 
carefully preserved in order to secure eternity for them. It is well 
known with what art the Egyptians endeavoured to eternize 
death, notwithstanding the manifest will of nature that we should 
be rid of its dreaded images, and that many animals held sacred 
shared with man himself in these posthumous honours. In the 
Soccora plains many wells containing mummies are rightly called 
birds’ wells, on account of the embalmed birds, generally of the 
Ibis kind, which they contain. These are found enclosed in long 
jars of baked earth, whose opening is hermetically closed with 
cement, so that it is necessary to break them to extract the 
mummy. Buffon obtained several of these jars, in each of which 
