before chemists' shops because of its association with alchemy. Sometimes the Arabs confused it with the salamander and pictured the latter as a bird.

The relation of the phoenix to astronomical reckoning gives a clue to the legend. It reappeared, according to some authors, at intervals of 250, 500, 654, 1,000, 1,461 or even of 7,006 years, but the accepted Phoenix Period or Cycle was 540 years, and Egypt reports having seen the fowl five times, the first in the reign of Sesostris, and the last time in A.D. 334. This relates the appearances of the phoenix to the Great Year, which Hardouin is 532 years.

says

It was an ancient belief that the same aspect of heaven and order of the stars that had prevailed when the world began recurred every 532 years, and that at one of these periods, with all the planets in conjunction or all the stars returned to the same point in the ecliptic, the world would be destroyed; or else that it would perish and revive again to go through the same sequence of celestial phenomena. The phoenix, self-regenerating, sun-dedicated, westward-winging, arrayed in the gold and purple of dawn and twilight, seems to be an obscure form of the sun myth; and this inference is strengthened by the fact that at Heliopolis a bird called the bennu was a symbol of the Egyptians for the rising sun. It was a heron which "created itself" and rose in a "fragrant flame" over a sacred tree. Bennu in Egyptian and phoenix in Greek are the same word, and signify the palm tree.

The Fung-wang

There was a Chinese phoenix called the fung-wang which at long intervals and only in the reigns of upright monarchs emerged from the deserts. Six feet high, with plumage reflecting the five colors that the Chinese recognized-red, white, yellow, azure, and black-it was something like an immense bird of paradise. It was called the chief of the three hundred and sixty kinds of birds, and classed with the dragon and the unicorn as a spiritual creature. On its poll appeared the Chinese character for uprightness, on its back that for humanity, while its wings enfolded the character for integrity. Its low notes were bell tones, and its high like those of a drum. When

you play the flute, in nine cases out of ten the fung-wang comes to hear, says the Shu King. It frequented only groves and gardens and would not peck living grass. The Bamboo Books record its visits as far back as 2647 B.C. The emperor in whose reign it first showed itself recast his cabinet so that officers bore the names of birds, and the Minister of the Calendar was called the Phoenix. "Another example of an interesting and beautiful species of bird which has become extinct within historic times," rashly concludes Gould.

Flying Serpents of Araby

Another winged creature besides the phoenix sought to go out of Arabia into Egypt, but its passage was opposed. This was the flying serpent. Herodotus says he went to "a certain place in Arabia" to ask about it. He saw the backbones and ribs of these reptiles in inconceivable number, piled in a gorge, and learned why they got no further. They are met in this place by "the birds called ibises, who forbid their entrance and destroy them all." Hence the Egyptians hold the ibis in

reverence.

Josephus uses the incident as basis of a story about Moses that is not in the Pentateuch. The Ethiopians had successfully invaded the land of Egypt, and an oracle advised the defenders to choose for their general Moses the Hebrew. His choice pleased the scribes of both nations-the Egyptian because they apprehended that Moses would be slain, and the Jewish because they expected that he would be the instrument of their deliverance. The line of march lay through the country of winged serpents, powerful and mischievous creatures that came out of the ground unseen or fell upon men from the air. But Moses "made baskets like unto arks of sedges, and filled them with ibes, and carried them along with him, which animals are the greatest enemies to serpents imaginable, for these fly from them when they come near them, and as they fly they are caught and devoured." So Moses passed on unscathed, and into the heart of an Ethiopian princess through whose aid her father's forces were routed.

After centuries of discussion the sacred ibis of the Egyptians was finally identified by the traveler Bruce with the bird the

Abyssinians call Father John; but the winged serpents have not been satisfactorily explained. It has been suggested that what Herodotus saw in the Arabian gorge was the remains of a locust invasion—a difficult surmise, although Pliny reports that the legs and wings of grasshoppers three feet long were dried in the sun and used by the Indians for saws.

The Roc

The case for the roc-a creature unknown to either Greek or Roman legend-rests mainly upon three beguiling names of travel tale. These are Aladdin and Sindbad of the Arabian Nights, and Marco Polo of the Diversities. By the magic of his lamp Aladdin, the wayward gamin of a Chinese city, had won a princess and a palace; and he had poisoned the African magician who sought to use him as a tool and then to take the lamp from him. Bent on vengeance, the magician's brother stabbed a holy woman with the very un-Chinese name of Fatima, disguised himself in her habiliments and won entrance into the palace of Aladdin and into the confidence of his princess. The latter asked the false Fatima what she thought of her residence, and this was the reply.

"My opinion is that if a roc's egg were hung up in the middle of the dome, this hall would have no parallel in the four quarters of the world, and your palace would be the wonder of the universe."

"My good mother," said the princess, "what is a roc, and where may one get an egg?"

"Princess," replied the pretended Fatima, "it is a bird of prodigious size, which inhabits the summit of Mount Caucasus; the architect who built your palace can get you one."

The princess consulted Aladdin, and, retiring to his apartment, he rubbed the lamp; when a genie appeared, he bade him procure the roc's egg. Whereupon the hall shook as if about to fall, and the genie exclaimed in a loud and terrible voice, "Is it not enough that I and the other slaves of the lamp have done everything for you, but you, by an unheard-of ingratitude, must command me to bring my master and hang him up in the midst of this dome? The attempt deserves that you, the princess, and the palace should be immediately reduced

to ashes; but you are spared because this request does not come from yourself." Then he told of the presence of a conspirator in the household. Aladdin's killing of the latter is the final episode of the tale, the fortunate adventurer and his spouse soon mounting the throne of China.

Sindbad encountered the parent bird on his second voyage, after he had been abandoned on an island; and first he saw its egg. He mistook the egg for a white dome of prodigious height and extent and found it fifty paces around and too smooth to climb to the top. All of a sudden the sky became dark as by a thick cloud and a huge bird came flying toward him. It alighted on the egg, and Sindbad, creeping close to the shell, tied himself by his turban to one of its legs, which was as big as the trunk of a tree. The next morning he hoped the roc would carry him away. Nor was his hope disappointed, and after an immense journey in the air-quite from Madagascar to India-the bird alighted in the Valley of Diamonds. There Sindbad disengaged himself, only to fall into other adventures.

Marco Polo was the first veracious traveler to bring to the west a report of the roc, and he was careful to state that he did not see the bird; he only heard of it. The roc, he said, comes to Madagascar from the south. It resembles the eagle, but is so much larger that it can carry away an elephant. "Persons who have seen the bird," he continues, "assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen paces [forty feet] from point to point, and that the feathers are eight paces [twenty feet] long and thick in proportion." Messer Marco guessed that these creatures might be griffins, half birds and half lions, and particularly questioned those who claimed to have seen them. No, was the reply, they were fowls altogether. Kublai Khan sent messengers to Madagascar to confirm the story. They brought back, as Marco heard, "a feather of the roc positively affirmed to have measured ninety spans, and the quill part to have been two palms in circumference." The delighted khan sent valuable gifts.

Two centuries afterward the roc reappears in the narrative of Father Joano dos Santos, a Portuguese Dominican friar traveling in eastern Ethiopia. He tells of a fellow Portuguese faring inland in Madagascar to purchase ivory, and leading a

large monkey on a chain. This he fastened to the trunk of a tree and lay down to rest; a monstrous bird snatched up both the monkey and the tree and flew away. The Shoshones have a story of an owl which carries men away to its island larder. Mewan legend speaks of the cannibal bird Yel-lo-kin with wings like pine trees which snatched children by the top of the head and bore them through the hole in the middle of the sky to its nest on the other side.

While the roc belongs to nature myth, matter-of-fact has a word to say. The extinct dodo is recalled, which, however, could not fly. The feather brought to Kublai, and the monstrous stump of a roc's quill which it is said was brought to Spain by a merchant from the China seas, may have been taken from a species of palm growing in Madagascar which has quill-like fronds. Southern Madagascar is frequented by very large birds-the albatross with a wing-spread of fifteen feet, and the condor, which may measure more than ten from tip to tip.

Everybody in the east believed that the roc, or more correctly the rukh, really existed. When the utmost depths of Arabic credulity are sounded, one reaches the probable basis of a legend into the superstructure of which exaggerated details of natural history have been built. One Arab writer says the length of the roc's wings is ten thousand fathoms, or nearly twelve miles, and these dimensions would make a fair-sized storm cloud. A Chinese tale describes the bird as a fowl which in its flight obscures the sun, and of whose quills "water-tuns" are made. One of the riders of the roc in another tale from the Thousand and One Nights is admonished to stop his ears from the wind, "lest thou be dazed by the noise of the revolving sphere and the roaring of the seas." It is shrewdly surmised that the roc is the storm cloud and the egg it covers is the suntrue master of the slaves of Aladdin's lamp.

The Rhinoceros of the Air

Another monstrous fowl, the rhinoceros of the air, was reported in mediæval travel and still commands the faith of the Samoyeds. Purchas abstracts the description given by Andrea Corsali in his Abyssinian travels. The bird is much bigger than an eagle and has a bow-fashioned bill or beak four feet long,