Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/379

 io* s n. OCT. is, 1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

311

version from Bosse well's 'Armorieof Honour' <1572) :-

"The pellicane feruently loueth her young byrdes. Yet when thei ben haughtie, and beginne to waxe hote, they smite her in the face, and wounde her, and she smiteth them and slaeth them. And after three daies she mourneth for them, and then striking herself in the side till the bloode runne out, she sparpleth it upon their bodyes, and by vertue thereof they quicken again." 'Symbolism in Christian Art,' 1891, p. 189.

Whence it appears that the small aviary known as " the kind, life-rendering pelican " did not unduly favour any particular region of its body during the vivisectional period.

A brief allusion to the employment of the pelican as a Christian symbol may conclude these jottings. According to Miss Twining ('Symb. and Emb. of Christ. Art,' 1852, p. 175), this does not occur before the Middle Ages, when the bird is found usually on the summit of the Cross, or otherwise connected with the death of Christ, the Resurrection, or the Eucharist. There is here also men- tioned a prayer by St. Thomas Aquinas in which the pelican is used symbolically. This prayer, which seems to nave escaped the notice of commentators, may well have been the source of Dante's " nostro Pellicano " {'Farad.,' xxv. 113), applied to Christ; and perhaps ultimately of that odd epithet "the Princely Pelican," bestowed by a writer in 1649 on Charles I. J. DORMER.

Woodside Green, S.E.

Venerable Bede (d. 735), commenting on Psalm ci., in his ' De Psalmorum Libro Exe- gesis,' gives the following explanation of the
 * 'pelicano solitudinis" :

"Pelicanus avis quaedam est, deserta quaerens, max line tamen habitans in desertis ripis Nili fluminis ; haec avis pullos suos interficit, postea super eos plangit, et iterum verberat se alis, et rostro, quod in tertia die sanguinem effundit, quo mox ut irrorantur, reviviscunt pulli." ' Patrologia Latina,' Migne, torn, xciii. 993.

As regards St. Jerome, however, I may say that neither in his ' Breviarium in Psalmos ' nor in his ' Liber Psalmorum ' does he make any mention of the fable referred to. More- over, after a careful search, I have failed to discover the myth anywhere else amongst his writings, and this in spite of the fact that the great doctor comments at length to the extent of a whole "number" on the verse in question, in his 'Epistle to Sunnia and Fretela' (ibid., torn. xxii. Hieron. i. 837).

That the story was "abroad" about the time of St. Jerome (d. 420) can, nevertheless, be made manifest from the writings of his vigorous and far - seeing contemporary St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), who treats

of the subject in his 'Enarratio in Ps. ci.,' where he says :

"Quod enim dicitur, vel etiam legitur de hac ave,

id est pelicano, non taceamus ; Vos sic audite, ut

si verum est, congruat ; si falsum est, non teneat. Dicuntur haec aves tanquam colaphis rostrprum occidere parvulos suos, eosdemque in nido occisos a se lugere per triduum : postremo dicunt matrem seipsam graviter vulnerare et sanguinem suum per filios fundere, quo illi superfusi reviviscunt. For- tasse hoc verum, fortasse falsum est." Ibid., Migne, torn, xxxvii. 1300.

B. W

Fort Augustus.

I cannot, for the moment, quote my authority, but I think the pelican, among the ancient Egyptians, was constituted a hieroglyphic of the four duties of a father towards his children namely, generation, education, instruction, and good example and that this symbolism was derived from its erroneously attributed habit of vulning itself in the process of nourishing its young. In Wilkinson's ' Egyptians ' (1878, vol. ^ ii. p. 102) there is a representation of a fowling scene, in which is a group of pelicans, the largest being turned towards what are appa- rently its young. Horapollo I am quoting Wilkinson says the pelican was the type of a fool (' Hierog.,' i. 54), and relates a ridiculous story of the reason for this unenviable dis- tinction. But he adds :

" Since it is remarkable for the defence of its young, the priests consider it unlawful to eat it, though the rest of the Egyptians do so, alleging that it does not defend them with discretion like the goose, but with folly." V r ol. iii. p. 328.

Fairholt says the pelican is met with on early Christian monuments and others of later date, but does not say where. If it does so occur, however, it is almost certain to be represented "in its piety," that is, vulning itself. It was the crest of the Pelhams, and occurs again on a seal of, I think, the twelfth century (see ' Catalogue of Seals'). Probably DR. MURRAY is already aware that it is frequently found in illuminated manuscripts, at least as early, I know, as the thirteenth century. An instance of the late survival of a belief in the bird's self-wounding propensities is cited by Mr. C. R. B. Barrett in an article in the Strand Magazine of, I think, about the year 1890, where it is stated that, as late as the reign of George L, at Peck ham Fair there was advertised to be on view "A pelican that suckles her young with her heart's blood, from Egypt." J. HOLDEN MACMICHAEL.

161, Hammersmith Road.

[MR. J. B. WAINEWRIGIIT also sendsjhe extract from St. Augustine.]