Let us now examine the books of the ancients and their monuments; let us compare what they have said of the ibis, or the figures of it which they have traced, with the bird which we have been describing; and we shall see all our difficulties vanishing, and all the testimonies according with what is best of all for the purpose, the body itself of the bird preserved in the mummy. “The most common ibises,” says Herodotus, (Euterpe, No. 76.) “have the head and the fore-part of the neck bare, the plumage white, excepting on the head, the nape, the ends of the wings and of the rump, which are black.[355] Their beak and feet are similar to those of the other ibises.” How does it happen that the travellers of our times do not make so good descriptions of the birds which they observe as that which Herodotus has made of the ibis? How could this description have been applied to a bird which has only the face bare, and which has that part of a red colour, to a bird which has the rump white, and not covered over at least as ours by the black feathers of the wings? And yet this latter character was essential to the ibis. Plutarch (De Iside et Osiride) says, that the manner in which the white was cut by the black in the plumage of this bird, presented the form of a lunar crescent. It is, in fact, by the union of the black of the last quills, with that of the two ends of the wings, that there is formed, in the white, a large semicircular notch, which gives to the white the figure of a crescent. It is more difficult to explain what he has intended to say, in averring that the feet of the ibis form an equilateral triangle with its beak. But we can understand the assertion of Ælian, that when it draws in its head and neck among its feathers, it represents, in some measure, the figure of a heart.[356] It was on account of this, according to Horus Apollo (c. 35.), the emblem of the human heart. From what Herodotus says of the nakedness of the throat, and of the feathers which covered the upper part of the neck, he appears to have had under his eyes a middle aged individual; but it is not the less certain, that the Egyptians also knew very well the individuals with the neck entirely bare. We see such represented from sculptures in bronze, in Caylus’s Collection of Egyptian Antiquities (vol. i. pl. x. no. 4., and vol. v. pl. xi. no. 1.) This last figure is even so like our bird represented in pl. v., that it might be said that it was taken from it.