Under the Sun. Philip Stewart Robinson
in shape, perfect rounds, his theory we are expressly told was quashed by Zaminchus, who proved that they assume divers forms, “sometimes those of cats and crows.” Zaminchus was doubtless right, and no one, therefore, should feel any tenderness for these shreds of Satan, these cinders from Tartarus. Zaminchus superfluously adds that in these forms they are “more knowing than any human being” (quovis homine scientior); and another old writer just as needlessly tells us that these “terrestrial devils” are in the habit of “flapping down platters” and “making strange noises.” Some, however, may urge that because some crows are devils, it does not follow that all are. This is plausible but unworthy of the subject, which should be studied in a liberal spirit and without hair-splitting. When King John killed Jews, he didn’t first finically investigate if they were usurers; he knew they were Jews, and that was enough. Besides, did any one ever see a crow that was not “quovis homine scientior”? If he did, he proved it by putting it to death, and, as dead crows count for nothing, that individual bird cannot be cited as a case in point. Further, do not all crows “flap down platters” (when they get the chance) and “make strange noises”? Are not these unequivocal signs of bedevilment? Do not Zaminchus, Bustius, and Cardan agree on this point? Does not the old Chinese historian lay it down that in the south of Sweden is situate “the land of crows and demons”? Is there not in Norway a fearful hill called Huklebrig, whither and whence fiery chariots are commonly seen by the country people carrying to and fro the souls of bad men in the likeness of crows? Crows, then, are indubitably the connecting link between devils. Class 3, “inventors of all mischief,” Prince Belial at their head—and Class 4, “malicious devils,” under Prince Asmodeus.[1] An inkling of their fallen state seems to be floating in the cerebra of crows, for they sin naturally and never beg pardon. Did any one ever see a contrite and repentant crow? When taken flagrante delicto does this nobody’s child provoke commiseration by craven and abject postures, deprecating anger by looks of penitence? Quite the contrary. These birds, if put to it, would deny that they stole Cicero’s pillow when he was dying; or that they sat, the abomination of desolation, where they ought not—profaning the Teraphim of John de Montfort, insulting his household gods and desecrating his Penates, while in the next room that great soldier and statesman was receiving the last consolations of Extreme Unction? Yet it is known they did. They tread the earth as if they had been always of it. And yet it pleases me to remember how Indra, in wrath for their tale-bearing—for had they not carried abroad the secrets of the Councils of the Gods?—hurled the brood down through all the hundred stages of his Heaven. Petruchio thought it hard to be braved in his own house by a tailor, and the tailor by an elephant; how keenly either would have felt the familiarity of Indian crows! In the verandahs they parade the reverend sable which they disgrace; they walk in the odor of sanctity through open doors, sleek as Chadband, wily as Pecksniff. Their step is grave, and they ever seem on the point of quoting Scripture, while their eyes are wandering on carnal matters. Like Stiggins, they keep a sharp lookout for tea-time. They hanker after fleshpots. They are as chary of their persons as the bamboo of its blossom, and distant to strangers. In England they pretend to be rooks (except during rook-shooting), but in India they brazen it out upon their own infamous individuality—for there are no rooks.
Another prominent visitor of my garden is the green parrot. It is, I think, Cervantes who has recorded the fact that Theophrastus complained “of the long life given to crows.” Now the argument of this complaint is not so superficial as at first it seems, and really contains internal evidence of a knowledge of bird-nature. Theophrastus, I take it, grumbled not simply because crows did in a long life get through more mischief than other birds can in a shorter one, but because, if Atropos were only more impartially nimble with her shears, crows would never be able to get through any mischief at all. And in this lies a great point of difference between the sombre crow and the dædal parrot.
The crow requires much time to develop and perfect his misdemeanors; the parrot brings his mischiefs to market in the green leaf. While a crow will spend a week with a view to the ultimate abstraction of a key, the parrot will have scrambled and screeched in a day through a cycle of larcenous gluttonies, and before the crow has finishing reconnoitring the gardener, the parrot has stripped the fruit-tree.
From these differences in the characters of the birds, I hold that Theophrastus chose “crows” advisedly, and made his complaint with judgment; but I wonder that, having thus headed a list of grievances, he did not continue it with a protest against the green color given to parrots. The probable explanation of the oversight is that he never saw a green parrot. But we who do see them have surely a reasonable cause for complaint, when nature creates thieves and then gives them a passport to impunity. For the green parrot has a large brain (some naturalists would like to see the Psittacid family on this account rank first among birds), and he knows that he is green as well as we do, and, knowing it, he makes the most of nature’s injudicious gift. He settles with a screech among your mangoes, and as you approach, the phud! phud! of the falling fruitlings assures you that he is not gone. But where is he? Somewhere in the tree, you may be sure, probably with an unripe fruit in his claw, which is raised half way to his beak, but certainly with a round black eye fixed on you; for, while you are straining to distinguish green feathers from green leaves, he breaks with a sudden rush through the foliage, on the other side of the tree, and is off in an apotheosis of screech to his watch-tower on a distant tree. To give the parrot his due, however, we must remember that he did not choose his own color—it was thrust upon him; and we must further allow that, snob as he is, he possesses certain manly virtues. He is wanting in neither personal courage, assurance, nor promptitude, but he abuses these virtues by using them in the service of vice. Moreover, he is a glutton, and, unlike his neighbors, the needle of his thoughts and endeavors always points towards his stomach. The starlings, bigots to a claim which they have forged to the exclusive ownership of the croquet ground, divide their attention for a moment between worms and intruders. The kite forbears to flutter the dove-cotes while he squeals his love-song to his mate; the hawk now and again affords healthy excitement to a score of crows who keck at him as he flaps unconcerned on his wide, ragged wings through the air. “Opeechee, the robin,” has found a bird smaller than himself, and is accordingly pursuing it relentlessly through bush and brier; the thinly feathered babblers are telling each other the secret of a mungoose being at that moment in the water-pipe; while the squirrels, sticking head downwards to their respective branches, are having a twopenny-half-penny argument across the garden path. Meanwhile, the green parrot is desolating the fruit-tree. Like the Ettrick Shepherd they never can eat a few of anything, and his luncheons are all heavy dinners. “ That frugal bit of the old Britons of the bigness of a bean,” which could satisfy the hunger and thirst of bur ancestors for a whole day, would not suffice the green parrot for one meal, for not only is his appetite inordinate, but his wastefulness also, and what he cannot eat he destroys. He enters a tree of fruit as the Visigoths entered a building. His motto is, “What I cannot take I will not leave,” and he pillages the branches, gutting them of even their unripest fruit. Dr. Jerdon, in his Birds of India, records the fact that “owls attack these birds by night,” and there is, ill-feeling apart, certainly something very comfortable in the knowledge that while we are warm a-bed owls are most probably garrotting the green parrots.
I have spoken elsewhere, with some inadvertence, of “the Republic of Birds;” although by my own showing—for I write of sovereign eagles and knightly falcons—the constitution of the volucrine world is an unlimited monarchy, of which the despotism is onty tempered by the strong social bonds that lend strength to the lower orders of birds. The tyrant kite is powerless before the corvine Vehm-gericht; and it is with hesitation that the hawk offers violence to a sparrows’ club. But there are undoubtedly among the feathered race some to whom a republic would present itself as the more perfect form of government, and to none more certainly than the mynas.[2] The myna is, although a moderate, a very decided republican, for, sober in mind as in apparel, he sets Ms. face against such vain frivolities as the tumbling of pigeons, the meretricious dancing of peafowl, and the gaudt bedizenment of the minivets; holding that life is real, life is earnest, and, while worms are to be found beneath the grass, to be spent in serious work. To quote “ane aunciente clerke,” he “obtests against the chaunting of foolish litanies before the idols of one’s own conceit”; would “chase away all bewildering humors and fancies”;