The worship of trees and groves is universal: peculiar trees, groves, and woods are worshipped in Tahiti, in the Fiji Islands, and throughout Polynesia; in barbarous Asia, in Europe, America, and the whole of Africa. Cameron, Schweinfurth, Stanley, and other modern travellers in Africa give many instances of this. Schweinfurth describes such a worship among the Niam-Niam, who hold that the forest is inhabited by invisible beings. This worship is naturally combined with that of birds, which become the confidants of the forest, repeat the mysteries of mother earth, and sometimes become interpreters and prophets to man. Birds, by their power of moving through the air as lords of the aerial space, by their arts of building, by the beauty of their plumage, their secret haunts in the forests and rocks, by their frequent appearance both by day and night, and by the variety of their songs, must necessarily have excited the fetishtic fancy of primitive men. The worship of birds was therefore universal, in connection with that of trees, meteors, and waters. They were supposed to cause storms; and the eagle, the falcon, the magpie, and some other birds brought the celestial fire on the earth. The worship of birds is also common in America, and in Central America the bird voc is the messenger of Hurakau, the god of storms. The magic-doctors of the Cri, of the Arikari, and of the Indians of the Antilles, wore the feathers and images of the owl as an emblem of the divine inspiration by which they were animated. Similar beliefs are common in Africa and Polynesia.[39] It is well known that the Egyptians worshipped the ibis, the hawk, and other birds, and that the Greeks worshipped birds and trees at Dodona, in consequence of a celebrated oracle. In Italy the lapwing and the magpie became Pilumnus and Picus, who led the Sabines into Picenus. Divination by eagles and other birds was practised at Rome, and German, Slav, and Celtic traditions abound in similar myths.[40] Nor are they wanting in the Bible itself, in which we hear of the trees of knowledge and of life, of some celebrated trees in the times of the patriarchs, of the raven and the dove sent out as messengers. The Old Testament speaks of the worship of groves at Ashtaroth in Canaan, of sacrifices under the green trees, and we know that such worship occurred in the Semitic races of Numidia and elsewhere.