_Odyssey_, xxii. 302; _Iliad_, xvi. 428, xvii. 460. Footnote 177: Buchholz, _Realien_, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 134. One of the few bits of primitive folk-lore enshrined in the Iliad relates to the wars of the cranes and pygmies. The passage is curious in many ways. It contains the first notice of bird-migrations, implies the constancy with which the ‘annual voyage’ of the ‘prudent crane’ was steered during three thousand years,[178] and records the dim wonder early excited by the sight and sound of that Aery caravan, high over seas Flying, and over lands with mutual wing Easing their flight. Footnote 178: Koerner, _Die Homerische Thierwelt_, pp. 62-65. In the Iliadic lines, the clamour of the Trojan advance, in contrast to the determined silence of their opponents, is somewhat disdainfully accentuated: When afar through the heaven cometh pealing before them the cry of the cranes, As they flee from the wintertide storms and the measureless deluging rains. Onward with screaming they fly to the streams of the ocean-flood, Bringing down on the folk of the Pigmies battle and murder and blood.[179] Footnote 179: Way’s _Iliad_, iii. 3-7. The simile is felicitously plagiarised by Virgil in his Quales sub nubibus atris Strymoniæ dant signa grues, atque æthera tranant Cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo,[180] but with the omission of the pygmy-element, probably as too childish for the mature taste of his Roman audience. Its origin may perhaps be sought in obscure rumours concerning the stunted races encountered by modern travellers in Central Africa. The association of ideas, however, by which they were connected in a hostile sense with ‘fowls o’ the air’ is of trackless antiquity. It partially survives in the notion, current in Finland, that birds of passage spend their winters in dwarf-land, ‘a dweller among birds’ meaning, in polite Finnish phrase, a dwarf; and bird-footed mannikins have a well-marked place in German folk-stories;[181] but the root from which these withered leaves of fable once derived vitality has long ago perished. Aristotle described the ‘small infantry warr’d on by cranes’ as cave-dwellers near the sources of the Nile;[182] Pliny turned them into a kind of pantomime-cavalry, mounted on rams and goats, locating them among the Himalayas, and conjuring up a fantastic vision of their periodical descents to the seacoast, to destroy the eggs and young of their winged enemies, against whom they could no otherwise hope to make head.[183] For such disinterested ravage as was committed on their behalf by Herzog Ernst, a mediæval knight-errant smitten with compassion for the miserable straits to which they were reduced by the secular feud imposed upon them, could scarcely be of more than millennial recurrence.[184] Footnote 180: _Æneid_, x. 264-66. Footnote 181: