Now it is all well enough to find this information in the writings of Pliny senior, who alleges that these “eagle-stones” (in fact natural hollow nodules of iron-impregnated clay) were transported by nesting eagles to their domiciles to assist them in ovulation, whence by analogy—recognizing unwittingly the kinship of men and animals—they would aid women in travail, and to smile over it with the shrewd editor of _Vulgar Errors_,[33] but it is odd to find such an absurdity recommended by a modern clergyman as “profitable” material for sermons.
Let me round out this chapter with that recognition of bird-migration in the custom among the Vikings of the 8th and 9th centuries of saying as they embarked upon some raid upon the coasts south of them that they were “following the swan’s path.”
Our first thought when we hear the word “deluge” is of Noah and his Ark, and the funny toy of our childhood rises to the mind’s eye. In that childhood we had no doubt that the flood described in the first book of the Old Testament covered the whole globe. Now we know that the story is a Semitic tradition, perhaps nothing more than a sun-myth in origin, although the actual occurrence of some extraordinary inundation may have got mixed with it and localized it. In fact, the belief in an all-submerging deluge, or, in what is its equivalent—namely, a time when the world was a plain of water with no land above its quiet surface—is a part of the mythology or theology, or both, of many diverse peoples in both hemispheres; and almost always birds are prominently associated with its incidents and the ensuing separation of land from water.
A surprising number of persons of ordinary intelligence even now, and in this enlightened country, continue to regard beds of water-worn gravels, and the fossil shells, etc., seen in the rocks, as relics of the Noachian deluge, and “diluvian” and “antediluvian” are terms that hardly yet have disappeared from popular geology.
The earliest available accounts of such a deluge as the Noachian are engraved on clay tablets recovered from the ruins of Babylonia, and written 2000 or more years before the beginning of the Christian era. Several narratives have been deciphered, agreeing in the facts of a vast destruction by water in Mesopotamia, and of a relatively huge house-boat built by a chosen family for the preservation of themselves and an extensive collection of livestock. After floating about for seven days this Babylonian ship grounded on a submerged hill-top, and seven days later the patriarchal shipmaster sent out as explorers a dove, a swallow, and a raven. The dove and the swallow returned, the raven did not.