Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/314

 258 DISCUSSION. continent wonld seem to have been assigned functions closley resembling those played by the peacock. The quail occupied a position of honor among the Aztecs, and to judge from what can be read in Sahagun and other early authorities, it must have been offered in sacrifice by hundreds on solemn occasions, I may say that in one of the old cliff dwellings on the Rio Verde, Arizona, in 1883, I came across several hundreds of the heads of the little quail of that region which would seem to have been wrenched from the bodies to which they had belonged and then to have been preserved, much as we may understand the Aztec priests did under the same circumstances. The Romans used the quail for fights much after the style of those with game-cocks, but they were in great awe of this little bird ; so much so that they regarded it as somewhat uncanny, saying that it was in the habit of eating the poison hellebore, and that it was subject to fits of epilepsy, the dis- ease of which they stood in so much dread, esteeming it as sent direct from the gods and therefore calling it the " Mor- bus sacer," or Sacred Disease. (De Gubernatis, " Zoological Mythology," vol. 3, p. 377 ; " The Quail.") The red-headed woodpecker, the yellowhammer, and the white-winged dove of Northern Mexico, with the cliff swal- low of the same region occupied places of honor in the native theogony. While treating of the sacred offices assigned to birds, either predatory or pacific, nocturnal or diurnal, we cannot ignore consideration of the medicinal values assigned or ascribed to their beaks, skins, feathers, down, excrement, and bones in primitive therapeutics which was part of primitive religion. The use of the down of birds in religious sacrifices and offerings was at one time so widely diffused or disseminated that, in my own opinion, it gave rise to the ignominious pun- ishment of tarring and feathering, on the well-established principle that each religion in the world seeks to make a burlesque or a punishment of practices which were held sacred by the religion which it supplanted. The first mention of tarring and feathering, as a punish- ment, is to be found in a rule of discipline promulgated by Richard the Lion-Hearted on his way to the Crusades.