CHAPTER II

BIRDS AS NATIONAL EMBLEMS

Several nations and empires of both ancient and modern times have adopted birds as emblems of their sovereignty, or at least have placed prominently on their coats of arms and great seals the figures of birds.

Among these the eagle—some species of the genus Aquila—takes precedence both in time and in importance. The most ancient recorded history of the human race is that engraved on the tablets and seals of chiefs who organized a civilization about the head of the Persian Gulf more than 4000 years before the beginning of the Christian era. These record by both text and pictures that the emblem of the Summerian city of Lagash, which ruled southern Mesopotamia long previous to its subjugation by Babylonia about 3000 B. C., was an eagle “displayed,” that is, facing us with wings and legs spread and its head turned in profile. This figure was carried by the army of Lagash as a military standard; but a form of it with a lion’s head was reserved as the special emblem of the Lagash gods, with which the royal house was identified—the king’s standard.

After the conquest of Babylonia by Assyria this eagle of Lagash was taken over by the conquerors, and appears on an Assyrian seal of the king of Ur many centuries later. “From this eagle,” says Ward,[23] “in its heraldic attitude necessitated by its attack on two animals [as represented on many seals and decorations] was derived the two-headed eagle, in the effort to complete the bilateral symmetry. This double-headed eagle appears in Hittite art, and is continued down through Turkish and modern European symbolism.”

Among the host of rock-carvings in the Eyuk section of the mountains of Cappadocia (Pteria of the Greeks) that are attributed to the Hittites, Perrot and Chipiez found carvings of a double-headed eagle which they illustrate;[112] and they speak of them as often occurring. “Its position is always a conspicuous one—about a great sanctuary, the principal doorway to a palace, a castle wall, and so forth; rendering the suggestion that the Pterians used the symbol as a coat of arms.”

Dr. Ward thought the Assyrian two-headed figure of their national bird resulted from an artistic effort at symmetry, balancing the wings and feet outstretched on each side, but I cannot help feeling that here among the Hittites it had its origin in a deeper sentiment than that. It seems to me that it was a way of expressing the dual sex of their godhead, presupposed, in the crudeness of primitive nature-worship, to account for the condition of earthly things, male and female uniting for productiveness—the old story of sky and earth as co-generators of all life. Many other symbols, particularly those of a phallic character, were used in Asiatic religions to typify the same idea; or perhaps the conception was of that divine duality, in the sense of co-equal power of Good and Evil, God and Satan, that later became so conspicuous in the doctrine of the ancient Persians. Could it have been a purified modification of this significance that made the eagle during the Mosaic period—if Bayley[24] is right—an emblem of the Holy Spirit? And Bayley adds that “its portrayal with two heads is said to have recorded the double portion of the spirit bestowed on Elisha.”

Old Mohammedan traditions, according to Dalton, give the name “hamca” to a fabulous creature identical with the bicephalous eagle carved on Hittite rock-faces. Dalton[25] says also that coins with this emblem were struck and issued by Malek el Sala Mohammed, one of the Sassanids, in 1217; and that this figure was engraved in the 13th century by Turkoman princes on the walls of their castles, and embroidered on their battle-flags.

To the early Greeks the eagle was the messenger of Zeus. If, as asserted, it was the royal cognizance of the Etruscans, it came naturally to the Romans, by whom it was officially adopted for the Republic in 87 B. C., when a silver eagle, standing upright on a spear, its wings half raised, its head in profile to the left, and thunderbolts in its claws, was placed on the military standards borne at the head of all the legions in the army. This was in the second consulship of Caius Marius, who decreed certain other honors to be paid to the bird’s image in the Curia.

One need not accuse the Romans of merely copying the ancient monarchies of the East. If they thought of anything beyond the majestic appearance of the noble bird, it was to remember its association with their great god Jupiter—the counterpart of Zeus. Nothing is plainer as to the origin of the ideas that later took shape in the divinities of celestial residence than that Jupiter was the personification of the heavens; and what is more natural than that the lightnings should be conceived of as his weapons? Once, early in his history, when Jupiter was equipping himself for a battle with the Titans, an eagle brought him his dart, since which time Jupiter’s eagle has always been represented as holding thunderbolts in its talons. The bird thus became a symbol of supreme power, and a natural badge for soldiers. The emperors of imperial Rome retained it on their standards, Hadrian changing its metal from silver to gold; and “the eagles of Rome” came to be a common figure of speech to express her military prowess and imperial sway.

By such a history, partly mythical, and partly practical and glorious, this bird came to typify imperialism in general. A golden eagle mounted on a spear, was the royal standard of the elder Cyrus, as it had been of his ancestors.

When Napoleon I. dreamed of universal conquest he revived on the regimental banners of his troops the insignia of his Roman predecessors in banditry—in fact he was entitled to do so, for he had inherited them by right of conquest from both Italy and Austria, the residuary legatees of Rome. Discontinued in favor of their family bees by the Bourbons, during their brief reign after the fall of Bonaparte, the eagle was restored to France by a decree of Louis Napoleon in 1852. There is a legend that a tame eagle was let loose before him when he landed in France from England to become President of the first French Republic. Now it is the proper finial for flagstaffs all over the world except, curiously, in France itself, where a wreath of laurel legally surmounts the tricolor of the Republic, which has discarded all reminders of royalty. Thus the pride of conquerors has dropped to the commonplace of fashion—

Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

The destruction of the Italian and western half of the old Roman empire was by the hands of northern barbarians who at first were mere conquerors and despoilers, but finally, affected by their contact with civilization and law, became residents in and rulers of Italy, and were proud to assume the titles and what they could of the dignity of Roman emperors. In the eighth century Charlemagne became substantially master of the western world, at least, and assumed the legionary eagle as he did the purple robes of an Augustus; and his successors held both with varying success until the tenth century, when German kings became supreme and in 962 founded that very unholy combination styled the Holy Roman Empire. For hundreds of years this fiction was maintained. At times its eagle indicated a real lordship over all Europe; between times the states broke apart, and, as each kept the royal standard, separate eagles contended for mastery. Thus Prussia and other German kingdoms retained on their shields the semblance of a “Roman” eagle; and the Teutonic Knights carried it on their savage expeditions of “evangelization” to the eastern Baltic lands.

All these were more or less conventional figures of the Bird of Jove in its natural form, but a heraldic figure with two heads turned, Janus like, in opposite directions, was soon to be revived in the region where, as we have seen, it had been familiar 2000 years before as the national emblem of the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire, which for hundreds of years contested with Rome, both the political and the ecclesiastical hegemony of the world. Just when this symbol came into favor at Constantinople is unknown, but one authority says it did not appear before the tenth century. At that time the Eastern emperors were recovering lost provinces and extending their rule until it included all the civilized part of western Asia, Greece, Bulgaria, southern Italy, and much of the islands and shores of the Mediterranean; and they asserted religious supremacy, at least, over the rival European empire erected on Charlemagne’s foundation. It would seem natural that at this prosperous period, when Byzantium proudly claimed, if she did not really possess all “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,” such a double-headed device might be adopted, signifying that she had united the western power with her own. The evidence of this motive is doubtful, however, for it is not until a much later date that the figure begins to be seen on coins and textiles, first at Trebizond, particularly in connection with the emperor Theodore Lascaris, who reigned at the beginning of the 13th century. Dalton[25] suggests plausibly that this symbol may have become Byzantine through the circumstance that this Lascaris had previously been despot of Nicomedia, in which province Bogaz-Keui and other Hittite remains were situated, and where the bicephalous carvings heretofore alluded to are still to be seen on rockfaces and ruins, always in association with royalty.

It is very attractive to think that this form of eagle was chosen, as has been suggested, to express the fact that Constantinople was now lord over both halves, East and West, into which Diocletian had divided the original empire of Rome. Whether this idea was behind the choice I do not know, but at any rate the two-faced eagle became latterly the acknowledged ensign of imperial Byzantium, and as such was introduced into European royal heraldry, whether or not by means of the returning Crusaders, as commonly stated, remains obscure.

In the 15th century what was left of the Holy Roman Empire became the heritage of the Austrian house of Hapsburg which had succeeded the German Hohenstauffens; and to Sigismund, head of the house in that century, is ascribed the design in the Austrian arms of the two-headed eagle, looking right and left, as if to signify boastfully that he ruled both East and West. These were relative and indefinite domains, but as he had, by his crowning at Rome, received at least nominal sovereignty over the fragmentary remains in Greece of the ancient Eastern Empire, he was perhaps justified in adopting the Byzantine ensign as “captured colors”; but a rival was soon to present a stronger claim to these fragments and their badge.

In this same period, that is in the middle of the 15th century, Ivan the Great of Russia was striving with high purpose and despotic strength to bring back under one sway the divided house of Muscovy, together with whatever else he could obtain. To further this purpose he married, in 1472, Sophia Paleologos, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, getting with her Greece and hence a barren title to the throne of the Eastern empire—a barren title because its former domain was now over-run by the Turks, but very important in the fact that it included the headship of the Greek, or Orthodox, Church. From this time Russia as well as Austria has borne a two-faced eagle on its escutcheon; and, although both birds are from the same political nest, the feeling between them has been far from brotherly.

It may be remarked here, parenthetically, that in Egypt the cult of the kingly eagle never flourished, for the griffon vulture, “far-sighted, ubiquitous, importunate,” became the grim emblem of royal power; and a smaller vulture (_Neophron percnopterus_) is called Pharaoh’s chicken to this day by the fellaheen. By “eagle” in Semitic (Biblical) legends is usually meant the lammergeier.

Prussia had kept a single-headed eagle as her cognizance in remembrance of her previous “Roman” greatness; and it was retained by the German Empire when that was created by Bismarck half a century and more ago. From it the Kaiser designated the two German military orders—the Black Eagle and the superior Red Eagle; and Russia and Serbia have each instituted an order called White Eagle. The traditional eagle of Poland is represented as white on a black ground. It was displayed during the period of subjection following the partition of the country in 1795, with closed wings, but now, since 1919, it spreads its pinions wide in the pride of freedom.

_In the years between 1914 and 1919 an allied party of hunters, enraged by their depredations, went gunning for these birds of prey, killed most of them and sorely wounded the rest!_

Although several species of real eagles inhabit the Mediterranean region and those parts of Europe and Asia where these nations lived, and warred, and passed away, and are somewhat confused in the mass of myth and tradition relating to them, the one chosen by Rome was the golden eagle, so called because of the golden gloss that suffuses the feathers of the neck in mature birds. Now we have this species of sea-eagle in the United States, and it has been from time immemorial the honored War-eagle of the native redmen. If it was needful at our political birth to put any sort of animal on our seal, and the choice was narrowed down to an eagle, it would have been far more appropriate to have chosen the golden rather than the white-headed or “bald” species—first because the golden is in habits and appearance far the nobler of the two, and, second, because of the supreme regard in which it was held by all the North American aborigines, who paid no respect whatever to the bald eagle. On the other hand, the white head and neck of our accepted species gives a distinctive mark to our coat of arms. The history of the adoption of this symbol of the United States of America is worth a paragraph.

On July 4, 1776, on the afternoon following the morning hours in which the Congress in Philadelphia had performed the momentous duty of proclaiming the independence of the United States, it dropped down to the consideration of its cockade, and appointed a committee to prepare a device for a Great Seal and coat-of-arms for the new republic.[26] Desiring to avoid European models, yet clinging to the traditions of art in these matters, the committee devised and offered in succession several complicated allegorical designs that were promptly and wisely rejected by the Congress. Finally, in 1782, the matter was left in the hands of Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Congress, and he at once consulted with William Barton of Philadelphia. They abandoned allegory and designed an eagle “displayed proper,” that is, with a shield on its breast. Mr. Barton, who was learned in heraldry, explained that “the escutcheon being placed on the breast of the eagle _displayed_ is a very ancient mode of bearing, and is truly imperial.” To avoid an “imperial” effect, however, a concession was made to local prejudice by indicating plainly that the bird itself was the American bald eagle—unless, indeed, that happened to be the only one Barton knew!

This design was finally adopted in 1782. Since then the Great Seal has been re-cut several times, so that the bird in its imprint is now a far more reputable fowl than at first—looks less as if it were nailed on a barn-door _pour encourager les autres_. In its right claw it holds a spray of ripe olives as an emblem of a peaceful disposition, and in its left an indication of resolution to enforce peace, in the form of American thunderbolts—the redman’s arrows.

There were men in the Congress in 1782, as well as out of it, who disliked using any eagle whatever as a feature of the arms of the Republic, feeling that it savored of the very spirit and customs against which the formation of this commonwealth was a protest. Among them stood that clear-headed master of common sense, Benjamin Franklin, who thought a thoroughly native and useful fowl, like the wild turkey, would make a far truer emblem for the new and busy nation. He added to the turkey’s other good qualities that it was a bird of courage, remarking, with his own delightful humor, that it would not hesitate to attack any _Red_coat that entered its barnyard!

Franklin was right when he argued against the choice of the bald eagle, at any rate, as our national emblem. “He is,” he said truly, “a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk, and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish and is bearing it to its nest the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little kingbird attacks him boldly. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem.”

None of these depreciatory things could Franklin have truly said of the skilful, self-supporting, and handsome golden eagle—a Bird of Freedom indeed. (Audubon named a western variety of it after General Washington.) This species was regarded with extreme veneration by the native redmen of this country. “Its feathers,” says Dr. Brinton, the ethnologist, “composed the war-flag of the Creeks, and its image, carved in wood, or its stuffed skin, surmounted their council-lodges. None but an approved warrior dare wear it among the Cherokees, and the Dakotas allowed such an honor only to him who first touched the corpse of the common foe. The Natchez and other tribes regarded it almost as a deity. The Zuñi of New Mexico employed four of its feathers to represent the four winds when invoking the rain-god.”

Hence a war-song of the Ojibways reported by Schoolcraft:

Hear my voice ye warlike birds! I prepare a feast for you to batten on; I see you cross the enemy’s lines; Like you I shall go. I wish the swiftness of your wings; I wish the vengeance of your claws; I muster my friends; I follow your flight.

Doesn’t this sound like a bit from the _Saga_ of Harold Hadrada?

Mexico did better in choosing her crested eagle, the harpy (_Thrasaëtus harpia_),a magnificent representative of its race, renowned from Paraguay to Mexico for its handsome black-and-white plumage adorned with a warrior’s crest, and for its grand flight, dauntless courage and amazing endurance. Quesada tells us that the Aztecs called it the winged wolf. The princes of Tlascala wore its image on their breasts and on their shield as a symbol of royalty; and in both Mexico and Peru, where it was trained for sport in falconry, it was preferred to the puma, which also was taught to capture deer and young peccaries for its master, as is the cheeta in India. Captive harpies are still set to fight dogs and wildcats in village arenas, and rarely are vanquished.

The tradition is that the Aztecs, a northern Nahuatl tribe, escaping from the tyranny of the dominant Chichemecas, moved about A. D. 1325 into the valley of Mexico (Tenochtitlan), and settled upon certain islets in a marshy lake—the site of the subsequent City of Mexico; and this safe site is said to have been pointed out to them by a sign from their gods—an eagle perched upon a prickly-pear cactus, the nopal, in the act of strangling a serpent. This is the picture Cortez engraved on his Great Seal, and Mexico has kept it to this day.

Guatemala was a part of ancient Mexico; and perched on the shield in Guatemala’s coat-of-arms is the green or resplendent trogon (_Pharomacrus mocinno_), the native and antique name of which is quetzal. This is one of the most magnificent of birds, for its crested head and body (somewhat larger than a sparrow’s) are iridescent green, the breast and under parts crimson, and the wings black overhung by long, plumy coverts. The quetzal’s special ornament, however, is its bluish-green tail, eight or ten inches long, whose gleaming feathers curve down in the graceful sweep of a sabre. It has been called the most beautiful of American birds, and it is peculiar to Central America.

How this trogon came to be Guatemala’s national symbol, made familiar by all its older postage-stamps, is a matter of religious history. One of the gods in the ancient Aztec pantheon was Quetzalcoatl, of whom it was said in their legends “that he was of majestic presence, chaste in life, averse to war, wise and generous in action, and delighting in the cultivation of the arts of peace.” He was the ruler of the realm far below the surface of the earth, where the sun shines at night, the abode of abundance where dwell happy souls; and there Quetzalcoatl abides until the time fixed for his return to men. The first part of the name of this beneficent god, associated with sunshine and green, growing things, meant in the Nahuatl language a large, handsome, green feather, such as were highly prized by the Aztecs and reserved for the decoration of their chiefs; and one tradition of the god’s origin and equipment relates that he was furnished with a beard made of these plumes. These royal and venerated feathers were obtained from the trogon, which his worshippers called _Quetzal-totl_. The emerald-hued hummingbirds of the tropics also belonged to him.

Although Mexico and Central America were “converted” to Christianity by a gospel of war and slavery, the ancient faith lived on in many simple hearts, especially in the remoter districts of the South, and nowhere more persistently than among the Mayas of Guatemala and Yucatan, whose pyramidal temples are moldering in their uncut forests. When, in 1825, Guatemala declared its independence and set up a local government, what more natural than that it should take as a national symbol the glorious bird that represented to its people the best influence in their ancient history and the most hopeful suggestion for the future.

In the religion of the Mayas of Yucatan the great god of light was Itsamna, one of whose titles was The Lord, the Eye of the Day—a truly picturesque description of the sun. A temple at Itzmal was consecrated to him under the double name Eye of Day-Bird of Fire. “In time of pestilence,” as Dr. Brinton informs us,[27] “the people resorted to this temple, and at high noon a sacrifice was spread upon the altar. The moment the sun reached the zenith a bird of brilliant plumage, but which in fact was nothing else than a fiery flame shot from the sun, descended and consumed the offering in the sight of all.” Another authority says that Midsummer-day was celebrated by similar rites. Hence was held sacred the flame-hued ara, or guacamaya, the red macaw.

The Musicas, natives of the Colombian plateau where Bogotá now stands, had a similar half-superstitious regard for this big red macaw, which they called “fire-bird.” The general veneration for redness, prevalent throughout western tropical America, and in Polynesia, is doubtless a reflection of sun-worship.

Let us turn to a lighter aspect of our theme.

France rejoices, humorously, yet sincerely, in the cock as her emblem—the strutting, crowing, combative chanticleer that arouses respect while it tickles the French sense of fun. When curiosity led me to inquire how this odd representative for a glorious nation came into existence, I was met by a complete lack of readily accessible information. The generally accepted theory seemed to be that it was to be explained by the likeness of sound between the Latin word _gallus_, a dunghill cock, and _Gallus_, a Gaul—the general appellative by which the Romans of mid-Republic days designated the non-Italian, Keltic-speaking inhabitants of the country south and west of the Swiss Alps. But whence came the name “gaul”? and why was a pun on it so apt that it has survived through long centuries? I knew, of course, of the yarn that Diodorus Siculus repeats: that in Keltica once ruled a famous man who had a daughter “tall and majestic” but unsatisfactory because she refused all the suitors who presented themselves. Then Hercules came along, and the haughty maiden surrendered at Arras. The result was a son named Galetes—a lad of extraordinary virtues who became king and extended his grandfather’s dominions. He called his subjects after his own name Galatians and his country Galatia. This is nonsense. Moreover “Galatia” is Greek, and was applied by the Greeks, long before the day of Diodorus, to the lands of a colony of Keltic-speaking migrants who had settled on the coast of Asia Minor, and became the Galatians to whom Paul wrote one of his _Epistles_. The Greek word _Galatai_ was, however, a form of the earlier _Keltai_.

As has been said, what we call Savoy and France were known to the Romans as _Gallia_, Gaul; but this term had been familiar in Italy long before Caesar had established Roman power over the great region between the German forests and the sea that he tersely described as _Omnia Gallia_; and it seems to have originated in the following way:

About 1100 B. C. two wild tribes, the Umbrians and the Oscans, swept over the mountains from the northeast, and took possession of northern Italy. These invaders were Nordics, and used an antique form of Teutonic speech. They were resisted, attacked, and finally overwhelmed by the Etruscans, who about 800 B. C., when Etruria was at the height of its power, extended their rule to the Alps and the Umbrian State disappeared. In the sixth century new hordes, calling themselves Kymri, coming from the west, and speaking Keltic dialects, swarmed into northern Italy from the present France. The harried people north of the Po, themselves mostly descendants of the earlier invasion, spoke of these raiders by an old Teutonic epithet which the Romans heard and wrote as _Gallus_, the meaning of which was “stranger”—in this case “the enemy.”

The word _Gallus_, Gaul or a Gaul, then, was an ancient Teutonic epithet inherited by the Romans from the Etruscans, and had in its origin no relation to _gallus_, the lord of the poultry-yard. It is most likely, indeed, that the term was given in contempt, as the Greeks called foreigners “barbarians” because they spoke some language which the Greeks did not understand; for the occupants of the valley of the Po at that time were of truly Germanic descent, and did not regard the round-headed, Alpine “Kelts” as kin in any sense, but rather as ancient foes. What the word on their lips actually was no one knows; but it seems to have had a root _gal_ or _val_, interchangeable in the sound (to non-native ears) of its initial letter, whence it appears that Galatai, Gael, Valais, Walloon, and similar names connected with Keltic history are allied in root-derivation. Wales, for example, to the early Teutonic immigrants into Britain was the country of the _Wealas_, _i.e._, the “foreigners” (who were Gaulish, Keltic-speaking Kymri); and the English are not yet quite free from that view of the Welsh.

The opportunity to pun with _gallus_, a cock, is evident, just as was a bitter pun current in Martial’s time between _Gallia_, a female Gaul and _gallia_, a gall-nut; but in all this there is nothing to answer the question why the pun of which we are in search—if there was such a pun—has endured so long. I think the answer lies in certain appearances and customs of the Keltic warriors.

Plutarch, in his biography of Caius Marius, describes the Kymri fought by Marius, years before Caesar’s campaigns, as wearing helmets surmounted by animal effigies of various kinds, and many tall feathers. Diodorus says the Gauls had red hair, and made it redder by dyeing it with lime. This fierce and flowing red headdress must have appeared much like a cock’s comb, to which the vainglorious strutting of the barbarians added a most realistic touch in the eyes of the disciplined legionaries. Later, the Roman authorities in Gaul minted a coin or coins bearing a curious representation of a Gaulish helmet bearing a cock on its crest, illustrations of which are printed by G. R. Rothery in his _A B C of Heraldry_. Rothery also states that the bird appears on Gallo-Roman sculptures. Another writer asserts that Julius Caesar records that those Gauls that he encountered fought under a cock-standard, which he regarded as associated with a religious cult, but I have been unable to verify this interesting reference. Caesar does mention in his _Commentaries_ that the Gauls were fierce fighters, and that one of their methods in personal combat was skilful kicking, like a game-cock’s use of its spurs—a trick still employed by French rowdies, and known as _la savate_. In the Romance speech of the south of France chanticleer is still _gall_.

The question arises here in the mind of the naturalist: If the aboriginal Gauls really bore a “cock” on their banners and wore its feathers in their helmets (as the Alpine regiments in Italy now wear chanticleer’s tail-plumes), what bird was it? They did not then possess the Oriental domestic fowls to which the name properly belongs, and had nothing among their wild birds resembling it except grouse. One of these wild grouse is the great black capercaille, a bold, handsome bird of the mountain forests, noted for its habit in spring of mounting a prominent tree and issuing a loud challenge to all rivals; and one of its gaudy feathers is still the favorite ornament for his hat of the Tyrolean mountaineer. By the way, the _cockade_, that figured so extensively as a badge in the period of the French Revolution was so called because of its resemblance to a cock’s comb.

Now comes a break of several centuries in the record, illuminated by only a brief note in La Rousse’s _Encyclopédie_, that in 1214, after the Dauphin du Viennois had distinguished himself in combat with the English, an order of knights was formed styled L’Ordre du Coq; and that a white cock became an emblem of the dauphins of the Viennois line.

The cock did not appear as a blazon when, after the Crusades, national coats-of-arms were being devised; nevertheless the _le coq de France_ was not forgotten, for it was engraved on a medal struck to celebrate the birth of Louis XIII (1601). Then came the Revolution, when the old régime was overthrown; and in 1792 the First Republic put the cock on its escutcheon and on its flag in place of the lilies of the fallen dynasty. When this uprising of the people had been suppressed, and Napoleon I had mounted the throne, in 1804, he substituted for it the Roman eagle, which he had inherited from his conquests in Italy and Austria, and which was appropriate to his ambitious designs for world domination. This remained until Napoleon went to Elba, and then Louis XVIII brought back for a short time the Bourbon lilies; yet medals and cartoons of the early Napoleonic era depict the Gallic cock chasing a runaway lion of Castile or a fleeing Austrian eagle, showing plainly what was the accepted symbol of French power in the eyes of the common folks of France. One medal bore the motto _Je veille pour le nation_.

Napoleon soon returned from Elba only to be extinguished at Waterloo, after which, during the régime of Louis Philippe, the figure of the Gallic cock was again mounted on the top of the regimental flagstaffs in place of the gilded eagle; an illustration of this finial is given in _Armories et Drapeaux Français_. Louis Philippe could do this legitimately, according to Rothery and others, because this bird was the crest of his family—the Bourbons—in their early history in the south of France. The Gallic cock continued to perch on the banner-poles until the foundation of the second Empire under Louis Napoleon in 1852. Since then the “tricolor,” originating in 1789 as the flag of the National Guard, and dispensing with all devices, has waved over France. Officially bold chanticleer was thus dethroned; but in the late World War, as in all previous periods of public excitement, the ancient image of French nationality has been revived, as the illustrated periodicals and books of the time show; and, much as they revere the tricolor, the soldiers still feel that it is _le coq Gaulois_ that in 1918 again struck down the black eagles of their ancient foes.

* * * * *

Juvenal’s sixth _Satire_, in which he castigates the Roman women of his day for their sins and follies, contains a line, thrown in as a mere side-remark—

Rara avis in terris, negroque similima cygno—

which has become the most memorable line in the whole homily. It has been variously translated, most literally, perhaps, by Madan: “A rare bird in the earth, and very like a black swan.” The comparison was meant to indicate something improbable to the point of absurdity; and in that sense has _rara avis_ been used ever since.

For more than fifteen hundred years Juvenal’s expression for extreme rarity held good; but on January 6, 1697, Dutch navigator Willem de Vlaming, visiting the southwestern coast of Australia, sent two boats ashore to explore the present harbor of Perth. “There their crews first saw two and then more black swans, of which they caught four, taking two of them alive to Batavia; and Valentyne, who several years later recounted this voyage, gives in his work a plate representing the ship, boats and birds at the mouth of what is now known from this circumstance as Swan River, the most important stream of the thriving colony now State of Western Australia, which has adopted this very bird as its armorial symbol.”

Another Australian bird, that, like the black swan, has obtained a picturesque immortality in a coat-of-arms; and on postage stamps, is the beautiful lyre-bird, first discovered in New South Wales in 1789, and now a feature in the armorial bearings of that State in the Australian Commonwealth. New Zealand’s stamps show the apteryx (kiwi) and emeu.

One might extend this chapter by remarking on various birds popularly identified with certain countries, as the ibis with Egypt, the nightingale with England and Persia, the condor with Peru, the red grouse with Scotland, the ptarmigan with Newfoundland, and so on. Then might be given a list of birds whose feathers belonged exclusively to chieftainship, and so had a sort of tribal significance. Thus in Hawaii a honeysucker, the mamo, furnished for the adornment of chiefs alone the rich yellow feathers of which “royal” cloaks were made; the Inca “emperors” of Peru, before the Spanish conquest, reserved to themselves the rose-tinted plumage of an Andean water-bird; an African chief affected the long tail-plumes of the widowbird—and so forth.

Only one of these locally revered birds entices me to linger a moment—the nightingale, beloved of English poets, whose oriental equivalent is the Persian bulbul. The mingled tragedies of the nightingale and the swallow form the theme of one of the most famous as well as sentimental legends of Greek mythology. These myths, strangely confused by different narrators, have been unravelled by the scholarly skill of Miss Margaret Verrall in her _Mythology of Ancient Athens_;[108] and her analysis throws light on the way the Greek imagination, from prehistoric bards down to the vase-decorators of the classic era, and to the dramatists Sophocles, Æschylus, and Aristophanes, dealt with birds—a very curious study. Miss Verrall reminds us that a word is necessary as to the names of the Attic tale. “We are accustomed, burdened as we are with Ovidian association, to think of Philomela as the nightingale. Such was not the version of Apollodorus, nor, so far as I know, of any earlier Greek writer. According to Apollodorus, Procne became the nightingale (’αηδών) and Philomela the swallow χελιδών. It was Philomela who had her tongue cut out, a tale that would never have been told of the nightingale, but which fitted well with the short restless chirp of the swallow. To speak a barbarian tongue was ‘to mutter like a swallow.’”

But there has arisen in Persia a literature of the nightingale, or “bulbul,” springing from a pathetic legend—if it is not simply poetic fancy—that as the bird pours forth its song “in a continuous strain of melody” it is pressing its breast against a rose-thorn to ease its heart’s pain. Giles Fletcher, who had been attached to one of Queen Elizabeth’s missions to Russia, and perhaps in that way picked up the suggestion, used it in one of his love-poems in a stanza that is a very queer mixture of two distinct fancies and a wrong sex, for the thrush that sings is not the one that has any occasion to weep about virginity:

So Philomel, perched on an aspen sprig, Weeps all the night her lost virginity, And sings her sad tale to the merry twig, That dances at such joyful mystery. Ne ever lets sweet rest invade her eye, But leaning on a thorn her dainty chest For fear soft sleep should steal into her breast Expresses in her song grief not to be expressed.

The poetic vision over which Hafiz and others have sighed and sung in the fragrant gardens of Shiraz seems to owe nothing to the Greek tale, and to them the plaintive note in the bird’s melody is not an expression of bitter woe, but only bespeaks regret whenever a rose is plucked. They will tell you tearfully that the bulbul will hover about a rosebush in spring, till, overpowered by the sweetness of its blossoms, the distracted bird falls senseless to the ground. The rose is supposed to burst into flower at the opening song of its winged lover. You may place a handful of fragrant herbs and flowers before the nightingale, say the Persian poets, yet he wishes not in his constant and faithful heart for more than the sweet breath of his beloved rose—

Though rich the spot With every flower the earth has got, What is it to the nightingale If there his darling rose is not.

But romantic stories of the association of the queen of flowers with the prince of birds are many, and the reader may easily find more of them. In a legend told by the Persian poet Attarall the birds once appeared before King Solomon and complained that they could not sleep because of the nightly wailings of the bulbul, who excused himself on the plea that his love for the rose was the cause of irrepressible grief. This is the tradition to which Byron alludes in _The Giaour_:

The rose o’er crag or vale, Sultana of the nightingale, The maid for whom his melody, His thousand songs, are heard on high, Blooms blushing to her lover’s tale— His queen, the garden queen, the rose, Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows.