It was founded on the idea, that the ibis was essentially a bird that destroyed serpents, and upon this very natural conclusion, that, in order to enable it to devour these reptiles, it was necessary for it to have a sharp beak, more or less resembling that of the heron. This idea is even the only good objection that can be made against the identity of our bird to the ibis. How, it is urged, could a bird with a weak bill, a curlew, devour those dangerous reptiles? It may be replied, that positive proofs, such descriptions, figures, and mummies, ought always to preponderate over accounts of habits too often imagined without any other motive than to justify the different worships rendered to animals. It might be added, the serpents from which the ibis delivered Egypt, are represented to us as very venomous, but not as very large. I have even obtained a direct proof that the birds preserved as mummies, which have had a beak precisely similar to that of our bird, were true serpent eaters; for I found in one of their mummies the still undigested remains of the skin and scales of serpents, which I have deposited in our anatomical galleries. But, at the present day, M. Savigny, who has observed, in a living state, and more than once dissected our white numenius, the bird which every thing concurs to prove to have been the ibis, asserts that it only eats worms, fresh water shells, and other small animals of that sort. Supposing this fact to have no exception, all that can be concluded from it is, that the Egyptians, as has happened more than once to them and others, had invented a false reason for an absurd worship. It is true that Herodotus says, he saw, in a place on the borders of the desert[370], near Buto, a narrow gorge, in which a multitude of bones were heaped up, which he was informed were remains of winged serpents, that were seeking to penetrate into Egypt in spring, and that the ibises had arrested their passage. But he does not say that he had witnessed their combats, or that he had seen those winged serpents in their entire state. The whole of his testimony, therefore, reduces itself to this, that he had observed a heap of bones, which may very well have been those of the multitude of reptiles and other animals which the inundation destroyed every year, and whose bodies it would naturally carry to the places where it was stopped, to the borders of the desert, and which must by preference have accumulated in a narrow gorge. However, it is equally from this idea of the combats of the ibis with serpents, that Cicero gives that bird a horny and strong beak[371]. Having never been in Egypt, he imagined that this must have been the case by mere analogy.