Chapter 7: On birds

3. Birds (_aves_) are so called because they have no definite roads (_viae_) but speed hither and thither through pathless (_avia_) ways.

9. Many names of birds were evidently made up from the sound of their cry, as _grus_, _corvus_, _cygnus_, _pavo_, _ulula_, _cuculus_, _graculus_, and so on. For the variety of their cry told men what they were to be called.

10. The eagle (_aquila_) is so called from its sharpness (_acumine_) of sight. For it is said to possess such power of vision that when it is borne over the sea with motionless wing and is not visible to human sight, even from such a lofty place it sees the fishes swim, and descending like a missile from an engine it seizes its booty and flies with it to the shore.

11. It is also said not to lower its gaze from the rays of the sun, and for this reason it lifts its young ones in its talons and exposes them to the rays of the sun, and keeps as worthy of its kind those which it sees keep a motionless gaze, and drops down as degenerate whatever ones it sees turning their gaze downward.

18. The swan (_cygnus_) is so called from singing, because it pours forth sweet song in modulated tones. And it sings sweetly for the reason that it has a long curving neck, and it must needs be that the voice, struggling out by a long and winding way, should utter various notes.

19. They say that in the Hyperborean regions when cithara players lead, many swans fly up and sing very harmoniously.

44. The crow (_cornix_), a bird full of years, has a Greek name[338] among the Latins, and augurs say it increases a man’s anxieties by the tokens it gives, that it reveals ambushes, and foretells the future. It is great wickedness to believe this, that God entrusts his counsels to crows.

[338] _Cornix_ is not a Greek word, as Isidore seems to imply.
Its nearest Greek equivalent is κορώνη.

66. To the hoopoe (_upupa_) the Greeks give its name because it attends to (_consideret_) human excrements and feeds on stinking filth, a most foul bird, helmeted with upstanding crests, always lingering at graves and human excrements. And whoever anoints himself with its blood, on going to sleep will see demons choking him.

67. _Tuci_, which is the name the Spaniards give to cuckoos (_cuculi_), were evidently named from their peculiar cry. These have a time for coming, perched on the shoulders of kites because of their short and weak flights, in order that they may not grow weary and fail in the long spaces of the air. Their saliva produces grasshoppers. [The cuckoo] eats the eggs it finds in the sparrow’s nest, and substitutes its own, which the sparrow receives and sets on and cares for.

79. All kinds of flying things are born twice. For first the eggs are born, then by the heat of the mother’s body they are formed and given life.

Chapter 8. On small winged creatures.

1. Bees (_apes_) are so called because they hold to one another by the feet, or it may be because they are born without feet (_pes_). For it is only later on that they get feet and wings. These are skilful in the business of producing honey, they dwell in homes allotted to them, they arrange their dwellings with a skill that makes no mistake, they store the hive from various flowers, and forming their wax-cells, they fill the camp with unnumbered young, and they have an army and kings, they make wars, flee from smoke, and are enraged by noise.

2. A good many have proved by experiment that these spring from the carcasses of cattle. For in order to create them the flesh of slain calves is beaten, in order that worms may be created from the rotten gore, and these afterward turn to bees. In a correct sense bees (_apes_) are so called because they spring from _boves_ as hornets from horses, drones from mules, wasps from asses.

BOOKS XIII AND XIV

[ON UNIVERSE AND EARTH]