account of the hippopotamus, no specimen of which he appears to have seen. He gives it the hoof of an ox, and the mane and neigh of a horse.
The sacred bird called the phœnix Herodotus confesses he never saw except in pictures. Indeed it was rare in Egypt, for it came but once in five hundred years, when the old phœnix died. According to the pictures, it was like an eagle, with plumage partly red and partly golden. The bird was said to come from Arabia, bringing the body of his father enclosed in a ball of myrrh, that he might bury it in the temple of the Sun. Our author did not seem to be acquainted with that other version of the phœnix fable, according to which it returned from the east after a stated period to burn itself in frankincense, and was again resuscitated. The phœnix was an emblem of the soul and its supposed migrations, and its journey to the east typified the constant aspiration of the soul towards the sun. Its period of migration referred to a solar cycle in the Egyptian calendar. Pliny says that the name was derived from a species of palm in Lower Egypt, which dies down to the root and then is renovated. Ovid makes the bird build its nest on a palm. In hieroglyphic language the palm-bough is the sign of the year.
Amongst other wonders, our author had heard of winged serpents, which flew across from Arabia, and was induced to undertake a journey to the country whence they came, where he says he saw some of their bones. The ibises were said to destroy them as they flew, which caused this bird to be held in great honour by the Egyptians. We are now in possession of the
traced in the Arabic temsah.—See Sir G. Wilkinson's note, Rawlinson, ii. 116.
