So, in the Libyan fable it is told That once an eagle, stricken with a dart, Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft, ‘With our own feathers, not by others’ hands ‘Are we now smitten.’
These little narratives, which are certainly interesting if true—as they are not—are good examples of the failure to exercise what may be called the common-sense of science.
Extraordinary indeed are the foolish things that used to be told of birds by men apparently wise and observant in other, even kindred, matters. Isaak Walton,[40] for example, so well informed as to fish, seemed to swallow falsities about other animals as readily as did the gudgeon Isaak’s bait. He writes in one place, after quoting some very mistaken remarks about grasshoppers, that “this may be believed if we consider that when the raven hath hatched her eggs she takes no further care, but leaves her young ones to the care of the God of Nature, who is said in the _Psalms_ ‘to feed the young that call upon him.’ And they be kept alive, and fed by a dew, or worms that breed in their nests, or some other ways that we mortals know not.”
The origin of this is plain. The ancient Jews told one another that ravens left their fledglings to survive by chance, not feeding them as other birds did. This is manifested in several places in the Bible, as in the 147th Psalm: “He giveth to the beast his food _and_ to the young ravens which cry”; but this absurd notion is far older, no doubt, than the Psalms. Aristotle[41] mentions that in Scythia—a terra incognita where, in the minds of the Greeks, anything might happen—“there is a kind of bird as big as a bustard, which ... does not sit upon its eggs, but hides them in the skin of a hare or fox,” and then watches them from a neighboring perch. Readers may guess at the reality, if any, behind this. Aristotle seems to have accepted it as a fact, for he goes on to describe how certain birds of prey are equally devoid of parental sense of duty; but we cannot be sure what species are referred to, despite the names used in Cresswell’s translation of the _History of Animals_, as follows:
The bird called asprey ... feeds both its young and those of the eagle ... for the eagle turns out its young ... before the proper time, when they still require feeding and are unable to fly. The eagle appears to eject its young from the nest from envy ... and strikes them. When they are turned out they begin to scream, and the phene comes and takes them up.