Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/317

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EDITORIAL GLEANINGS.
289

und Mythologie der alten Aegypter,' pp. 24, 105)? How animals with crocodiles' heads were supposed to sing, I do not know. I presume that the phœnix (which was confused apparently with the swan) sang before it had the misfortune to get a crocodile's head, and that the crocodile learned the secret of the phœnix! The references in the introduction to the dragon are also very interesting. Has Dr. James intentionally omitted mentioning the old Babylonian dragon-myth? It is true this has become sadly distorted. In the act of closing this letter I find in the Palestine Fund 'Quarterly Statement' for July, 1888, a note by Col. Conder on crocodiles in Palestine, in which he points out that these animals are mentioned as 'corcodrils' by Sir John Maundeville; this is very near Chalkadri. He also quotes from a tract of the thirteenth century, showing that crocodiles were then called 'cocatrices.'"


The author of the above has subsequently added the following note to the same journal:—

"Mr. H. Bradley points out to me that the Chalkadri of the Slavonic Enoch would naturally arise out of calcatrix (cf. 'Cockatrice' in the 'New English Dictionary '). Calcatrix is a literal translation of ίχνεύμων; the ichneumon and the crocodile were confounded. This would introduce a fresh element into the strange mingling of animals represented by Chalkadri, and an element entirely inconsistent both with the phœnix and with the crocodile from the point of view of (Egyptian) solar mythology. For the sungod hated the ichneumon (the symbol of Set) as much as he must have loved the phœnix and the crocodile (his own symbols). That the writer takes the most important part of the Chalkadri (the head) from the crocodile is, however, satisfactory to a mythologist, and we may, perhaps, rest assured now, thanks to M. Berger and Mr. Bradley, that the Chalkadri was in no sense either a serpent or (in spite of its wings) a bird. And if M. Berger pointed in the right direction, the 'New English Dictionary' suggests the probably right conclusion."


At the May meeting of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society Mr. Southwell exhibited a remarkably fine example of the old race of Norfolk Great Bustards, which had recently come into his possession, and had not hitherto been recorded. The specimen is a very old male, and is even larger than the fine male killed in 1818, now in the Castle Museum; it was shot at Swaffham early in the present century, probably about 1830, by a Mr. Glasse, Q.C., who then occupied Vere Lodge, Raynham, near Fakenham, Norfolk, as a shooting box. It remained in the possession of the Glasse family until recently sold with the effects of the daughter, Miss Glasse, who died at Bournemouth.