So also the name πελαργοὶ, meaning storks, has been taken to be the foundation of Πελασγοί; and the explanation has been given, that the stork is a migratory bird, and that the Pelasgi were called after it on account of their wanderings. This explanation, which seems worse than the former, rests in part upon a statement of Herodotus misconstrued. He calls the Dorians ἔθνος πουλυπλάνητον κάρτα[403], and this has been erroneously applied to the Pelasgians, of whom, on the contrary, he says, οὐδαμῆ κω ἐξεχώρησε. This statement from a writer of the age of Herodotus, fully neutralises the statement of Dionysius, who describes them as itinerant, and never securely settled[404]. He may, indeed, mean no more than Thucydides means, when he says (i. 2), that the occupants of good soils were the most liable to dispossession. But does this idea of itinerancy correspond with the migrations of the stork, which seem to have reference to the steady periodical variations of climate, and to be as far as possible from the idea implied in ‘much-roving?’ It appears to have been the understood characteristic of that bird, to draw to and dwell about the settled habitations of men. It seems highly improbable, and without precedent, that a widely spread nation should take its name from a bird: but may not the bird have taken its name from the nation? If it were a nation emphatically of settlers, as opposed to pirates, robbers, nomads, and rovers of all kinds, dwelling with comfort in fixed abodes, as opposed to the ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαίευναι[405], might not birds, which seemed to share these settlements, be reasonably named after the people? It by no means appears as if Aristophanes, in the passage where he uses the term, intended a mere pun. It is in the comedy of the Birds[406], and is an allusion to that law of the Athenians, evidently here signified under the name of storks, which required children to provide for their parents[407]. The passage is clearly a testimony to the Pelasgic origin of the Athenians: and it may be based upon the belief, that the storks took their name from the Pelasgi, and that the similarity lay in their habit of settling on the roofs of houses and the like, almost as if inhabitants, in the villages of which the Pelasgi were the first Greek founders. It also gives room for the conjecture that Πελαργοὶ may have been the old form of the name. The stork, it may be remembered, was one of the sacred birds of the Egyptians.