hemp are grown. The variety of production is due to the great natural diversity of the soils. Small farms are the rule, and the fields in those cases are surrounded by hedges relieved by pollard trees. Along the roads or in the enclosures are planted numerous pear and apple trees, the latter yielding cider, part of which is manufactured into brandy. Beech, oak, birch and pine are the chief timber trees in the extensive forests of the department. Orne has iron mines and freestone quarries; a kind of smoky quartz known as Alençon diamond is found. Its most celebrated mineral waters are those of the hot springs of Bagnoles, which contain salt, sulphur and arsenic, and are employed for tonic and restorative purposes in cases of general debility. In the forest of Bellême is the chalybeate spring of La Hesse, which was used by the Romans.
Cotton and linen weaving, principally carried on at Flers (q.v.) and La Ferté-Macé (pop. 4355), forms the staple industry of Orne. Alençon and Vimoutiers are engaged in the production of linen and canvas. Vimoutiers has bleacheries, which, together with dye-works, are found in the textile centres. Only a few workmen are now employed at Alençon in the making of the lace which takes its name from the town. Foundries and wire-works also exist in the department, and articles in copper, zinc and lead are manufactured. Pins, needles, wire and hardware are produced at Laigle (pop. 4416), and Tinchebray is also a centre for hardware manufacture. There are also glass-works, paper-mills, tanneries (the waters of the Orne being reputed to give a special quality to the leather) and glove-works. Coal, raw cotton, metals and machinery are imported into the department, which exports its woven and metal manufacture, live stock and farm produce.
The department is served by the Western railway. There are four arrondissements, with Alençon, the capital, Argentan, Domfront and Mortagne as their chief towns, 36 cantons and 512 communes. The department forms the diocese of Sées (province of Rouen) and part of the académie (educational division) of Caen, and the region of the IV. army corps; its court of appeal is at Caen. The chief places are Alençon, Argentan, Mortagne, Flers and Sées. Carrouges has remains of a château of the 15th and 17th centuries; Chambois has a donjon of the 12th century; and there is a fine Renaissance château at O. A church in Laigle has a fine tower of the 15th century. There are a great number of megalithic monuments in the department.
ORNITHOLOGY,[1] properly the methodical study and consequent knowledge of birds with all that relates to them; but the difficulty of assigning a limit to the commencement of such study and knowledge gives the word a very vague meaning, and practically procures its application to much that does not enter the domain of science. This elastic application renders it impossible in the following sketch of the history of ornithology to draw any sharp distinction between works that are emphatically ornithological and those to which that title can only be attached by courtesy; for, since birds have always attracted far greater attention than any other group of animals with which in number or in importance they can be compared, there has grown up concerning them a literature of corresponding magnitude and of the widest range, extending from the recondite and laborious investigations of the morphologist and anatomist to the casual observations of the sportsman or the schoolboy.
Though birds make a not unimportant appearance in the earliest written records of the human race, the painter’s brush has preserved their counterfeit presentment for a still longer period. A fragmentary fresco taken from a tomb at Medum was deposited some years ago, though in a decaying condition, in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo. This Egyptian picture was said to date from the time of the third or fourth dynasty, some three thousand years before the Christian era. In it were depicted with a marvellous fidelity, and thorough appreciation of form and colouring (despite a certain conventional treatment), the figures of six geese. Four of these figures can be unhesitatingly referred to two species (Anser albifrons and A. ruficollis) well known at the present day. In later ages the representations of birds of one sort or another in Egyptian paintings and sculptures become countless, and the bassi-rilievi of Assyrian monuments, though mostly belonging of course to a subsequent period, are not without them. No figures of birds, however, seem yet to have been found on the incised stones, bones or ivories of the prehistoric races of Europe.
History of Ornithology to End of 18th Century.
Aristotle was the first serious author on ornithology with whose writings we are acquainted, but even he had, as he tells us, predecessors; and, looking to that portion of his works on animals which has come down to us, one finds that, though more than 170 sorts of birds are mentioned,[2] yet what is said of them amounts on the whole to Early works. very little, and this consists more of desultory observations in illustration of his general remarks (which are to a considerable extent physiological or bearing on the subject of reproduction) than of an attempt at a connected account of birds. One of his commentators, C. J. Sundevall—equally proficient in classical as in ornithological knowledge—was, in 1863, compelled to leave more than a score of the birds of which Aristotle wrote unidentified. Next in order of date, though at a long interval, comes Pliny the Elder, in whose Historia Naturalis Book X. is devoted to birds. Neither Aristotle nor Pliny attempted to classify the birds known to them beyond a very rough and for the most part obvious grouping. Aristotle seems to recognize eight principal groups: (1) Gampsonyches, approximately equivalent to the Accipitres of Linnaeus; (2) Scolecophaga, containing most of what would now be called Oscines, excepting indeed the (3) Acanthophaga, composed of the goldfinch, siskin and a few others; (4) Scnipophaga, the woodpeckers; (5) Peristeroide, or pigeons; (6) Schizopoda, (7) Steganopoda, and (8) Barea, nearly the same respectively as the Linnaean Grallae, Anseres and Gallinae. Pliny, relying wholly on characters taken from the feet, limits himself to three groups—without assigning names to them—those which have “hooked tallons, as Hawkes; or round long clawes, as Hennes; or else they be broad, flat, and whole-footed, as Geese and all the sort in manner of water-foule”—to use the words of Philemon Holland, who, in 1601, published a quaint and, though condensed, yet fairly faithful English translation of Pliny’s work.
About a century later came Aelian, who died about A.D. 140, and compiled in Greek (though he was an Italian by birth) a number of miscellaneous observations on the peculiarities of animals. His work is a kind of commonplace book kept without scientific discrimination. A considerable number of birds are mentioned, and something said of almost each of them; but that something is too often nonsense according to modern ideas. The twenty-six books De Animalibus of Albertus Magnus (Groot), printed in 1478, are founded mainly on Aristotle. The twenty-third of these books is De Avibus, and therein a great number of birds’ names make their earliest appearance, few of which are without interest from a philologist’s if not an ornithologist’s point of view, but there is much difficulty in recognizing the species to which many of them belong. In 1485 was printed the first dated copy of the volume known as the Ortus sanitatis, to the popularity of which many editions testify.[3] Though said by its author, Johann Wonnecke von Caub (Latinized as Johannes de Cuba), to have been composed from a study of the
- ↑ Ornithologia, from the Greek ὀρνιθ-, crude form of ὄρνις, a bird, and -λογία, allied to λόγος, commonly Englished a discourse. The earliest known use of the word Ornithology seems to be in the third edition of Blount’s Glossographia (1670), where it is noted as being “the title of a late Book.”
- ↑ This is Sundevall’s estimate; Drs Aubert and Wimmer in their excellent edition of the Ἱστορίαι περὶ ζῴων (Leipzig, 1868) limit the number to 126.
- ↑ Absurd as much that we find both in Albertus Magnus and the Ortus seems to modern eyes, if we go a step lower in the scale and consult the “Bestiaries” or treatises on animals which were common from the 12th to the 14th century we shall meet with many more absurdities. See for instance that by Philippe de Thaun (Philippus Taonensis), dedicated to Adelaide or Alice, queen of Henry I. of England, and probably written soon after 1121, as printed by the late Mr Thomas Wright, in his Popular Treatises on Science written during the Middle Ages (London, 1841).
