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But in his play of the Rhodian, or the Woman Caressing, he uses the word in the feminine gender; and says in that passage that the Sicilian pigeons are superior to all others—

Breeding within some pigeons from Sicily, The fairest shaped of all their species.

And Pherecrates, in his Painters, says—

Send off a pigeon ([Greek: peristeron]) as a messenger.

And in his Petale he uses the diminutive form [Greek: peristerion], where he says,—

But now, my pigeon, fly thou like Callisthenes, And bear me to Cythera and to Cyprus.

And Nicander, in the second book of his Georgics, mentions the Sicilian doves and pigeons, and says,—

And do you in your hall preserve a flock Of fruitful doves from Sicily or Dracontium, For it is said that neither kites nor hawks Incline to hurt those choice and sacred birds.

52. We must also mention ducks. The male of these birds, as Alexander the Myndian says, is larger than the female, and has a more richly coloured plumage: but the bird which is called the glaucion, from the colour of its eyes, is a little smaller than the duck. And of the species called boscades the male is marked all over with lines, and he also is less than the duck; and the males have short beaks, too small to be in fair proportion to their size: but the small diver is the least of all aquatic birds, being of a dirty black plumage, and it has a sharp beak, turning upwards towards the eyes, and it goes a great deal under water. There is also another species of the boscades, larger than the duck, but smaller than the chenalopex: but the species which are called phascades are a little larger than the small divers, but in all other respects they resemble the ducks. And the kind called uria are not much smaller than the duck, but as to its plumage it is of a dirty earthenware colour, and it has a long and narrow beak: but the coot, which also has a narrow beak, is of a rounder shape, and is of an ash colour about the stomach, and rather blacker on the back. But Aristophanes, in his Acharnians, in the following lines, mentions the duck and the diver, from whose names ([Greek: nêtta] and [Greek: kolymbas]) we get the verbs [Greek: nêchomai], to swim, and [Greek: kolymbaô], to dive, with a great many other water birds—