This exceptional favour fair Halcyone owes to her close relationship with Æolus, since with him rested the power to lash the waves to fury or to soothe them to rest. This beautiful Greek myth doubtless underlies the superstition as to the dead body of the kingfisher indicating the direction of the wind, though probably it never occurs to the rustic meteorologist as he watches his revolving kingfisher that any idea of the loving Halcyone turning to greet the coming Æolus enters into the philosophy of his test. It was for centuries a belief that storks fed with filial care their aged parents. Thus Heywood, writing in the year 1635, asserts in “The Hierachie of the Blessed Angells” that “The indulgent storke, who builds her nest on hye (Observ’d for her alternat pietie), Doth cherish her unfeather’d young and feed them, And looks from them the like, when she should need them. (That’s when she grows decrepit, old, and weake) Nor doth her pious Issue cov’nant breeke: For unto her, being hungry, food she brings, And being weake, supports her on her wings.” One meets with the same notion again in Beaumont, where he asserts that “The stork’s an emblem of true piety: Because, when age has seized and made his dam Unfit for flight, the grateful young one takes His mother on his back, provides her food, Repaying thus her tender care for him, Ere he was fit to fly.” The extraordinary idea that storks were found only in countries having a republican form of government held its ground for a considerable time, though it would appear as though nothing could have been simpler than its prompt disproof. Cranes, it was believed, bore stones with them when they were migrating, in order that they might not be swept out of their course by the wind. A somewhat parallel notion was that swallows in their annual migrations carried in their bills, when about to cross the sea, a piece of stick, to be laid upon the water from time to time as a convenient resting place. The idea of the cranes steadying themselves in flight by a ballasting of small rock was too quaintly happy a conception not to bear amplification, so we find that the bees, the never-failing emblems of industry and wisdom, were equally ready to avail themselves of the notion. “Bees that are emploied in carrying of honie chuse alwaies to have the wind with them if they can. If haply there do arise a tempest whiles they bee abroad they catch up some little stonie greet to ballaise and poise themselves against the wind. Some say that they take it and lay it upon their shoulders.” How the little stony grit maintains this latter position the old authors do not stop to explain. In the Georgics of Virgil we find a reference to this, which evidently even then was an old and unchallenged belief, in the lines:— “And oft with pebbles, like a balanced boat, Poised through the air on even pinions float”—