Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/400

372 He mentions other reptiles, but they are fabulous, with the exception of the Lizard—the bright southern creature, not the dull brown reptile of our heath-lands. He speaks of it as darting from hedge to hedge in the blaze of the summer sun like a flash of lightning (Inf. xxv, 79)—

And now I come to birds; and it is here that the poet is at his best. One almost hesitates to deal with them, for Dean Church has already touched upon sundry of the poet's similes with regard to them; but I will venture to go on, for there is still something to be said, even though I must go over part of the ground which he has covered. The words he uses for birds are derived from "avica," or its diminutive "augello," "uccello," and "oca." The latter is interesting. It properly means a bird, but in modern Italian is only used for goose. I have come across an analogous case in Norway, where in a certain district they employ the word "om"—which merely means fowl—to the Shoveler. "Oca" only occurs once in the poem, and there merely as a crest on the pouch of one of the usurers (Inf. xvii. 63); on a red ground was blazoned "un oca bianca piu che burro," which would seem to refer to the goose.

As throughout the poem Dante has to allude to masses of souls floating in the air, it is only natural that he should frequently compare them to birds—for instance (Inf. v. 40), the pack of Starlings. The migratory birds that he had watched going south in autumn and north in spring furnished him with many suitable comparisons. Of these he mostly chose the Stork (Ciconia alba) and Crane (Grus communis), to either which he sometimes alludes distinctly, sometimes leaves the reader to guess to which he is referring. He tells us that of the spirits frozen into the ice (Inf. xxxii. 36), that their teeth chatter, and make a noise like Storks; that quaint incessant noise which is so well represented by Hauff 's "Herr Klapperschnabel." He sketches for us the Stork standing up in its nest after feeding its young (Par. xix. 92), or draws a picture of the little Stork trying to leave its nest (Purg. xxv. 10). Then we have allusions to