That he who stills the raven’s clamorous nest
Would in the way his wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide.

It is plain that the plowman-poet was too canny to believe it, but perhaps it is well to say that there is no foundation in fact for this extraordinary charge. Ravens are faithful and careful parents: in fact Shakespeare makes a character in Titus Andronicus mention that “some say that ravens foster forlorn children,” a view quite the opposite of the other.

Another calumny is thoughtlessly repeated by Brewer[34] in his widely used reference-book Phrase and Fable (which unfortunately is far from trustworthy in the department of natural history) when he records: “Ravens by their acute sense of smell, discern the savor of dying bodies, and under the hope of preying on them, light on chimney-tops or flutter about sick-rooms.”

The correction to be made here is not to the gruesome superstition but to the asserted keenness of the bird’s sense of smell. The gathering of vultures to a dead animal is not by its odor, but by the sight of the carcass by one, and the noting of signs of that fact by others, who hasten to investigate the matter. Oliver Goldsmith[32] fell into the same error when he wrote of the protective value, as he esteemed it, of this sense in birds in general, “against their insidious enemies”; and cited the practice of decoymen, formerly so numerous as wildfowl trappers in the east of England, “who burn turf to hide their scent from the ducks.” The precaution was wasted, for none of the senses in birds is so little developed or of so small use as the olfactory. Goldsmith’s Animated Nature was, a century ago, the fountain of almost all popular knowledge of natural history among English-reading people, and was often reprinted. As a whole it was a good and useful book, but its accomplished author was not a trained naturalist, and absorbed some statements that were far from authentic—perhaps in some cases he was so pleased with the narrative that he was not sufficiently critical of its substance, as in the story of the storks in Smyrna:

The inhabitants amuse themselves by taking away some of the storks’ eggs from the nests on their roofs, and replacing them with fowls’ eggs. “When the young are hatched the sagacious male bird discovers the difference of these from their own brood and sets up a hideous screaming, which excites the attention of the neighboring storks, which fly to his nest. Seeing the cause of their neighbor’s uneasiness, they simultaneously commence pecking the hen, and soon deprive her of life, supposing these spurious young ones to be the produce of her conjugal infidelity. The male bird in the meantime appears melancholy, though he seems to conceive she justly merited her fate.”

In Goldsmith’s day such contributions to foreign zoology were common. Even the so-called scientific men of early Renaissance times indulged in the story-teller’s joy. Albertus Magnus asserted that the sea-eagle and the osprey swam with one foot, which was webbed, and captured prey with the other that was armed with talons. Aldrovandus backed him up, and everybody accepted the statement until Linnæus laughed them out of it by the simple process of examining the birds. These, you may protest, are not mistakes but pure fancies; yet it is only a short step from them to the romance, hardly yet under popular doubt, that the albatross broods its eggs in a raftlike, floating nest and sleeps on the wing, as you may read in Lalla Rookh:

While on a peak that braved the sky
A ruined temple tower’d so high
That oft the sleeping albatross
Struck the wild ruins with her wing,
And from her cloud-rocked slumbering
Started, to find man’s dwelling there
In her own fields of silent air.

Even more poetic is the tale of the death-chant of the swan, still more than half-believed by most folks, for we constantly use it as a figure of speech, describing in a word, for example, the final protest of a discarded office-seeker as his “swan-song.” It is useless to hunt for the origin of this notion—it was current at any rate in Aristotle’s time, for he writes: “Swans have the power of song, especially when near the end of their life, and some persons, sailing near the coast of Libya, have met many of them in the sea singing a mournful song and have afterwards seen some of them die.” Pliny, Ælian (who called Greece “mother of lies”), Pausanias and other more recent philosophers, denied that there was any truth in this statement; but the sentimental public, charmed by the pathos of the picture presented to their imaginations, and refusing to believe that in reality this bird’s only utterance is a whoop, or a trumpet-like note, have kept it alive aided by the poets who have found it a useful fancy—for example Byron, who moans

Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
Where nothing save the waves and I
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
There, swan-like, let me sing and die.

The poets are not to be quarrelled with too severely on this account. It must be conceded that our literature would have been considerably poorer had poets declined to accept all that travellers and country folk told them. Chaucer uses the “swan-song,” and Shakespeare often alludes to it, as in Othello:

I will play the swan and die in music.
A swan-like end, fading in music.

Even Tennyson has a poem on it, picturing a scene of the most charming nature, the pensive beauty of which is vastly enhanced by the bold use of the fable.

It has required both the hard scientific scrutiny of the past century and a wide scattering of geographical information, to offset in the minds of most of us the tendency to imagine that “over the hills and far away” things somehow are picturesquely different from those in our own humdrum neighborhood, and that perhaps yonder the laws of nature, so inexorable here, may admit now and then of exceptions. Amber came from—well, few persons knew precisely whence; and wasn’t it possible that it might be a concretion of birds’ tears, as some said?

Around thee shall glisten the loveliest amber
That ever the sorrowing sea-bird hath wept—

sang an enamored poet.

Facilis descensus Averni is a Latin phrase in constant use, with the implication that it is difficult to get back—sed revocare gradus, that’s the rub! But how many know that this dark little cliff-ringed lake near Cumae, in Italy, was anciently so named in the belief that because of its noxious vapors no bird could fly across it without being suffocated. Hence a myth placed there an entrance to the nether world, and, with keen business instincts, the Cumaean sybil intensified her reputation as a seer by taking as her residence a grotto near this baleful bit of water.

Who can forget the monumental mistake of that really great and philosophic naturalist, Buffon, in denying that the voices of American birds were, or could be, melodious. He said of our exquisite songster, the wood-thrush, that it represented the song-thrush of Europe which had at sometime rambled around by the Northern Ocean and made its way into America; and that it had there, owing to a change of food and climate, so degenerated that its cry was now harsh and unpleasant, “as are the cries of all birds that live in wild countries inhabited by savages.” The danger of error in drawing inferences as to purpose in nature is great in any case; but it is doubly so when the philosopher is mistaken as to his supposed facts.

By going back a few decades one might find examples of more or less amusing errors in natural history to the point of weariness, but with one or two illustrations from The Young Ladies’ Book (Boston, 1836), I will bring this chapter to its end. This little volume, doubtless English in origin, was intended for the entertaining instruction of school-girls, and in many respects was excellent, but when it ventured on American ornithology it put some amusing misinformation into its readers’ minds. It teaches them that our butcherbirds “bait thorns with grasshoppers to decoy the lesser insectivorous birds into situations where they may easily be seized”—a beautiful sample of teleological assumption of motive based on the fact that the shrike sometimes impales dead grasshoppers, mice and so forth on thorns or fence-splinters, having learned apparently that that is a good way to hold its prey (its feet are weak, and unprovided with talons) while it tears away mouthfuls of flesh. Often the victim is left there, only partly eaten, or perhaps untorn; and rarely, if ever, does the shrike return to it, and certainly it attracts no “lesser insectivorous” birds nor any other kind.

The author also instructs his young ladies that “the great American bittern has the property of emitting a light from its breast,” and so forth. His authority for this long-persistent and picturesque untruth was a review of Wilson’s American Ornithology in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History (London, Vol. vi., 835.) Speaking of this familiar marsh-bird, which, let me repeat, has no such aid in making a living, or need of it, as it is not nocturnal in its habits, the anonymous reviewer writes:

It is called by Wilson the great American bittern, but, what is very extraordinary, he omits to mention that it has the power of emitting a light from its breast, equal to the light of a common torch, which illuminates the water so as to enable it to discover its prey.... I took some trouble to ascertain the truth of this, which has been confirmed to me by several gentlemen of undoubted veracity, and especially by Mr. Franklin Peale, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Museum.

A similar belief existed in the past in regard to the osprey, which we in the United States call the fish-hawk. Loskiel (Mission to the Indians, 1794) records it thus: “They say that when it [the fish-hawk] hovers over the water, it possesses a power of alluring the fish toward the surface, by means of an oily substance contained in its body. So much is certain, that, if a bait is touched with this oil, the fish bite so greedily, that it appears as if it were impossible for them to resist.” How much of this is native American, and how much is imported it is hard to determine now.