VIRGIL'S BEASTS, BIRDS, AND BEES.
MENNYSON, who understood and loved the same things as Virgil, has written of him with deeper feeling than any other English poet :—
" Thou that singest wheat and woodland,
filth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word."
VirgiPs Georgics, indeed, probably makes a stronger appeal to English country-dwellers than any other Latin or Greek classic. Mr. Wards Fowler, in the preface which he con- tributes to a delightful little commentary upon the natural history of this book, recently published by Mr. T. M. Royds (Blackwell, 3s. 6d. net), tells a story which illustrates the point practically. He had to push a" sporting youth" through Responsions, and tried him at first with Livy, which be gave up in despair. He then took up the Georgics, and adroitly began with the third. When he came to Virgirs points of the horse, the sporting youth, to use his own expression, "found," and afterwards went straight to the finish. Probably the same thing, or something like it, might happen with a boy who first discovered how much Virgil knew about farming, or birds and bees. Mr. Royds's commentary should be a valuable help to tutors in similar difficulties. But it has the additional value and charm of being the best of reading even for those who may not be required or, indeed, be able to translate a page of VirgiL Agriculture is the oldest of human industries, and for that reason there should be nothing surprising in finding that the farmers of Italy two thousand years ago knew very little less than the farmers of our own day. Two thousand years is not a long period in the development of main principles of stock- breeding. So that when Virgil, who possessed deep practical knowledge as well as the ability to wield "the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man," writes of horses and cattle and sheep and goats, and gives instructions for mating them and the proper way of feeding and watering them, we find him telling us very much what an English shepherd or stud-groom would tell a pupil to-day ; he gives us, in short, the experience of the countless generations who have bred horses and sheep since the first nomad tribes drove their flocks from pasturage to pasturage over the plains. Nor can we claim to have advanced greatly even in matters in which we might be expected to have gained a knowledge far superior to that of a Roman poet of two thousand years ago. Veterinary science has not made the fullest progress possible when Mr. Royds can quote from an article in a con- temporary magazine dealing with sheep to the effect that "during the last ten or twelve years new forms of disease have appeared. A flock of healthy sheep in a week or ten days are in serious trouble; many die, and the remainder reoover slowly with weakened systems. Post-mortems often disclose nothing. Shrewd old shepherds are baffled, experienced flockmastere are beyond their depth, and trained pathologists are as much in the dark as the youngest student." Virgil is not vaguer than this when be writes of the cattle plague which wasted the herds of Northern Italy. His description of the dying ox at the end of the third Georgia might well have been written after looking at the ravages of the English cattle plague of 1865. Perhaps we are brought even closer to Virgil's practical knowledge of farming by a reference which Mx, Roy& makes to the prevention of illness among hounds, which followed the construction of kennels built on the lines laid down by Virgil for a threshingfloor. Virgil gives instructions for the making of a floor which is to be hard, damp-proof, and dust-proof. It must be "smoothed with a heavy roller, kneaded with the hand, and made solid with astringent chalk, lest weeds should creep into it, or dust get into it and break it into holes, and then all manner of plagues make their game of it." Mr. Royds reminds us that the great foxhunter, Assheton Smith, followed these instructions for the making of a floor for his kennels, and "the hounds were strangers to shoulder-lameness ever afterwards."
It would be natural that the names which Virgil gives to his birds should lead to difficulties of identification. Even Gilbert White was not always right in what he wrote or believed about different species of birds, and in Virgirs day, when birds had not been classified in any scientific manner, it would have been impossible for the most careful observer to be sure that his description would be recognized by others. Of birds which it is difficult to identify perhaps the most puzzling is the full= of Georgia L Virgil was a good weather prophet, and his descriptions of the behaviour of birds and beasts when bad weather is coming are evidently founded on personal observation. He speaks of rain coming "when the gulls (mtergi) fly swiftly home from over the sea," and when "the cormorants, whose element is the water (Micas marinae), are sporting on the land." Now, is fulica the cor- morant? If not, what other bird can it be P Mr. Royds says that "fulica is usually understood to be the coot," which Linnaeus named fullers afro, and he seems to follow the late Professor Newton in holding that fillet& is allied in meaning to faligo, soot, that is, fulica is the soot-coloured bird. But if so, we are in a difficulty. There is no soot- coloured bird which comes inland from the sea in stormy weather. Coots are fresh-water birds, and go very little on land ; cormorants sit on rocks and points in fine weather as well as foul, but do not habitually come inland before a storm. In short, no dark bird fits the text. But need the bird be dark ? IefiWoce with its short d, necessarily allied with faliga with its long 6? If once we give up the idea of a dark bird, the diffioulty disappears. Virgil is speaking of two different kinds of gulls ; one is ntergus and the other isfu/ica—possibly the common gull and the blackheaded gull, which we may see ourselves come inland together. Possibly, even, fulica may still be allied with fuligo and mean " blackheaded."
Pulite is not the only difficulty. Virgil writes in Georgia
338, of bringing the flocks down to drink in the evening, when the dew at moonrise revives the lawns, and "the kingfisher (elegem) sings along the shore, the goldfinch (acalanthis) through the brake." That is Conington's trans- lation. But the kingfisher does not as a fact sing, nor is the goldfinch a bird to be heard every day. Mr. Royds suggests that cicalanthis should be a warbler, possibly the blackcap. "flagon, in any ease, cannot be the kingfisher. No one, however, who has listened to the chorus which breaks out every spring evening at sunset can doubt that Virgil had a real bird in his mind. Mr. Warde Fowler thinks that alcyon is the tern, but surely in this context, when the flocks are brought down to drink, litora does not mean the seashore, bat the banks of the river. It would be interesting to found an argument on the supposition that there is a genuine reason for the mytho- logical "halcyon days," when the sea is calm in winter and the halcyon broods its young. Might there not be some con- fusion of sight and sound, and the song be referred to the wrong bird ? A warm February evening on which a number of blackbirds are singing is truly a "halcyon day." The sea would be calm, for blackbirds will not sing in wind and cold.
Virgirs bee-lore, of course, has been read and accepted by bee-masters ever since the fourth Georgic was written. It is true that he calls the queens reges, but, after all, the sex of the queen was not determined until Swammerdam settled it in the seventeenth century. In other respects, however, Virgil is as "knowledgeable" as any modern bee expert, and Mr. Royds, who is himself a beekeeper, pronounces Georgia IV., 8-35, to contain "practical precepts of the highest excellence" —for instance, that care should be taken as to the position of the hive in regard to the wind, for a cold, heavy wind will often blow a heavily laden bee down into the grass under the hive, where it cannot get up again. One point in particular is raised by two lines, 50 and 64, in the fourth Georgic. Can bees bear? Virgil evidently believed they could. Mr. Royds is not so certain, and says that "probably bees have some sense of hear- ing or some faculty that corresponds to it, but as to its nature and range we are very much in the dark." However, he wrote to an expert, who bore out Virgirs contention, or rather belief. "One might ask," wrote this expert, "if bees cannot hear each other, what possible purpose do the sounds serve " Queens, it is an accepted fact, can hear each other piping. But Virgil, of course, wrote before the days of hives in which bees could be watched as we can watch them, and much of what our modern bee-masters know must necessarily have been hidden from him. On one point he is definitely wrong. He writes a long description of how to get up a new stock by killing a bullock, in whose carcase bees are supposed to breed, something after the manner of the swarm seen by Samson. This may be an ancient superstition, but there is little doubt of its real origin. The insects which are "born" out of decaying animal carcases in hot countries are very like bees, and are often, indeed, taken for them, but they are, as a fact, drone-files, which are hatched very much in the manner of the common blow-fly or bluebottle.
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