The architecture of birds / [Anon].

  • James Rennie
Date:
[1831]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The architecture of birds / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    winter solstice,—so that, by her privilege, we have seven days and seven nights, in the very heart of winter, wherein we may sail without danger.’”* The poets, however, have successfully employed the ancient: fiction. ‘Theocritus, and Petrarch, and Tasso, equally avail themselves of it. The notion that the. stor my waves are calmed for the sake of one pretty bird, be- longs to the empire of poetry, however it may be re- jected by the truth of natural history. We may laugh at the conceit, and yet admire the sweet lines of one of our old writers. ‘ Blow, but gently blow, fayre winde, From the forsaken shore, : And be, as to the halcyon, kinde, Till we have ferried o’er.’+ Montaigne is equally undoubting in his faith as to the wonderful construction of the haleyon’s nest. ‘The most inquisitive into the secrets of nature could never yet arrive at the knowledge of the wonderful fabric and architecture wherewith the halcyon builds her nest for her little ones, nor guess at the matter. | Plutarch, who has seen and handled many of them, thinks ‘it is the bones of some fish, which with her beak and no other instrument she joins and binds together, interlac- ing them some lengthwise, and others across, and add- ing ribs and hoops in such manner, that she forms at last a round vessel fit to launch, which being done, and. the building finished, she carries it to the edge of the sea beach, where the waves beating gently agaiest it shows her where to mend what is not well j joined and knit, and where better to fortifie the seams that are leaky and open at the beating of the waves, and on the contrary, what is well built and has had due finishing, the beating of the waves does so close and * Montaigne, Apology for Raymond de Sebonde. r W. Brow ne.
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