CHAPTER XI. 
THE WHITE STORK 
(Ciconia alba). 
“ Who bids the Stork, Columbus-like explore 
Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before ? 
Who calls the councils, states the certain day, 
Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way?” 
Rope. 
No book on Natural History, intended for family use, 
is complete without giving some account of the children’s 
friend—the Stork. Everyone is acquainted with it,—at 
all events in pictures,—and all love it. Its arrival and 
departure is still, and has been for a thousand years, a 
sign of the seasons, an event in the village, and a red- 
letter day in the family calendar. 
I need not describe the form and colour of the Stork, 
because both are so well known; but of its habits and 
ways, nest-building and migration, there is much to be 
said; for though it inhabits many countries of the Old 
World,—Europe, from the south of Sweden to the 
southern and western borders of our continent, and the 
whole of Central Asia as far as Japan,—and migrates far 
into Africa, still it is not known in all villages, nor is it 
a resident species in every locality. As in England, so in 
many parts of our fatherland, it does not take up its 
regular abode, being only a passing visitor while on its 
5 K 
