Page:Freud - Leonardo da Vinci, a psychosexual study of an infantile reminiscence.djvu/54

44 were subjects of scientific interest even to the Greeks and Romans, and long before we ourselves were able to read the Egyptian monuments we had at our disposal some communications about them from preserved works of classical antiquity. Some of these writings belonged to familiar authors like Strabo, Plutarch, AminianusAmmianus [sic] Marcellus, and some bear unfamiliar names and are uncertain as to origin and time, like the hieroglyphica of Horapollo Nilus, and like the traditional book of oriental priestly wisdom bearing the godly name Hermes Trismegistos. From these sources we learn that the vulture was a symbol of motherhood because it was thought that this species of birds had only female vultures and no males. The natural history of the ancients shows a counterpart to this limitation among the scarebæus beetles which were revered by the Egyptians as godly, no females were supposed to exist.