sure of, that the rivers, great broads, and carrs, afford great store of otters with us; a great destroyer of fish, as feeding but from the vent downwards; not free from being a prey itself; for their young ones have been found in buzzards' nests. They are accounted no bad dish by many; are to be made very tame; and in some houses have served for turnspits.

ON THE OSTRICH.1

[MS. SLOAN. 1830, fol. 10, 11; 1847.]

THE ostrich hath a compounded name in Greek and Latin -Struthio-Camelus, borrowed from a bird and a beast, as being a feathered and biped animal, yet in some ways like a camel; somewhat in the long neck; somewhat in the foot and, as some imagine, from a camel-like position in the part of generation.

It is accounted the largest and tallest of any winged and feathered fowl; taller than the gruen or cassowary. This ostrich, though a female, was about seven feet high, and some of the males were higher, either exceeding or answerable unto the stature of the great porter unto king Charles the First. The weight was a2 in grocer's scales.

Whosoever shall compare or consider together the ostrich and the tomineio, or humbird, not weighing twelve grains, may easily discover under what compass or latitude the creation of birds hath been ordained.

The head is not large, but little in proportion to the whole body. And, therefore, Julius Scaliger, when he mentioned birds of large heads (comparatively unto their bodies),

1 On the ostrich.] This was drawn up for his son Edward, to be delivered in the course of his lectures. It occurs in the middle of the paper on Birds; but evidently was inserted by mistake in the binding; it is written on larger paper.

2

a...

.] Utterly undecypherable in the original.

named the sparrow, the owl, and the woodpecker; and, reckoning up birds of small heads, instanceth in the hen, the peacock, and the ostrich.*

The head is looked upon by discerning spectators to resemble that of a goose rather than any kind of orpoulos, or passer and so may be more properly called cheno-camelus, or ansero-camelus.

:

There is a handsome figure of an ostrich in Mr. Willoughby's and Ray's Ornithologia: another in Aldrovandus and Jonstonus, and [Bellonius; but the heads not exactly ageeing. "Rostrum habet exiguum, sed acutum," saith Jonstoun; "un long bec et poinctu," saith Bellonius; men describing such as they have an opportunity to see, and perhaps some the ostriches of very different countries, wherein, as in some other birds, there may be some variety.

In Africa, where some eat elephants, it is no wonder that some also feed upon ostriches. They flay them with their feathers on, which they sell, and eat the flesh. But Galen and physicians have condemned that flesh, as hard and indigestible. The emperor Heliogabalus had a fancy for the brains, when he brought six hundred ostriches' heads to one supper, only for the brains' sake; yet Leo Africanus saith that he ate of young ostriches among the Numidians with a good gust; and, perhaps, boiled, and well cooked, after the art of Apicius, with peppermint, dates, and other good things, they might go down with some stomachs.

I do not find that the strongest eagles, or best-spirited hawks, will offer at these birds; yet, if there were such gyrfalcons as Julius Scaliger saith the duke of Savoy and Henry, king of Navarre, had, it is like they would strike at them, and, making at the head, would spoil them, or so disable them, that they might be taken.+

If these had been brought over in June, it is, perhaps, * See Scaliger's Exercitations.

See Scaliger's Exercitations, and in his Comment. on Arist. De Historia Animal.

3 as hard and indigestible.] "And, therefore, when, according to Lampridius, the emperor Heliogabalus forced the Jews to eat ostriches, it was a meat not only hard of digestion to their stomachs, but also to their consciences, as being a forbidden meat food."--Addition from MS. Sloan. 1847.

likely we might have met with eggs in some of their bellies, whereof they lay very many: but they are the worst of eggs for food, yet serviceable unto many other uses in their country; for, being cut transversely, they serve for drinking cups and skull-caps; and, as I have seen, there are large circles of them, and some painted and gilded, which hang up in Turkish mosques, and also in Greek churches. They are preserved with us for rarities; and, as they come to be common, some use will be found of them in physic, even as of other eggshells and other such substances.

When it first came into my garden, it soon ate up all the gilliflowers, tulip-leaves, and fed greedily upon what was green, as lettuce, endive, sorrell; it would feed on oats, barley, peas, beans; swallow onions; eat sheep's lights and livers. Then you mention what you know more.

When it took down a large onion, it stuck awhile in the gullet, and did not descend directly, but wound backward behind the neck; whereby I might perceive that the gullet turned much; but this is not peculiar unto the ostrich; but the same hath been observed in the stork, when it swallows down frogs and pretty big bits.

It made sometimes a strange noise; had a very odd note, especially in the morning, and, perhaps, when hungry.

According to Aldrovandus, some hold that there is an antipathy between it and a horse, which an ostrich will not endure to see or be near; but, while I kept it, I could not confirm this opinion; which might, perhaps, be raised because a common way of hunting and taking them is by swift horses.

It is much that Cardanus should be mistaken with a great part of men, that the coloured and dyed feathers of ostriches were natural; as red, blue, yellow, and green; whereas, the natural colours in this bird were white and greyish. Of [the] fashion of wearing feathers in battles or wars by men, and women, see Scaliger, Contra Cardan. Exercitat. 220.

If wearing of feather-fans should come up again, it might much increase the trade of plumage from Barbary. Bellonius saith he saw two hundred skins with the feathers on in one shop of Alexandria.

Then you mention, &c.] This must be considered as spoken "aside"

to his son.

VOL. III.

Z

BOULIMIA CENTENARIA.!

[MS. SLOAN. 1833, and MS. RAWL. LVIII.]

THERE is a woman now living in Yarmouth, named Elizabeth Michell, an hundred and two years old; a person of four feet and half high, very lean, very poor, and living in a mean room with pitiful accommodation. She had a son after she was past fifty.2 Though she answers well enough unto ordinary questions, yet she apprehends her eldest daughter to be her mother; but what is most remarkable concerning her is a kind of boulimia or dog-appetite; she greedily eating day and night what her allowance, friends, or charitable persons afford her, drinking beer or water, and making little distinction or refusal of any food, either of broths, flesh, fish, apples, pears, and any coarse food, which she eateth in no small quantity, insomuch that the overseers for the poor have of late been fain to augment her weekly allowance. She sleeps indifferently well, till hunger awakes her; then she must have no ordinary supply whether in the day or night. She vomits not, nor is very laxative. This is the oldest example of the sal esurinum chymicorum, which I have taken notice of; though I am ready to afford my charity unto her, yet I should be loth to spend a piece of ambergris I have upon her, and to allow six grains to every dose till I found some effect in moderating her appetite: though that be esteemed a great specific in her condition.

1 Boulimia.] Brutus was attacked with this disease on his march to Durachium.-Plutarch.

2 She had a son, &c.] A duplicate copy of this paper in the Bodleian (MS. Rawl. lviii.) reads "her youngest son is forty-five years old.”

UPON THE DARK THICK MIST HAPPENING ON THE 27TH OF NOVEMBER, 1674.

[MS. SLOAN. 1833, fol. 136.]

THOUGH it be not strange to see frequent mists, clouds, and rains, in England, as many ancient describers of this country have noted, yet I could not [but] take notice of a very great mist which happened upon the 27th of the last November, and from thence have taken this occasion to propose something of mists, clouds, and rains, unto your candid considerations.

Herein mists may well deserve the first place, as being, if not the first in nature, yet the first meteor mentioned in Scripture, and soon after the creation, for it is said, Gen. ii. that "God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground," for it might take a longer time for the elevation of vapours sufficient to make a congregation of clouds able to afford any store of showers and rain in so early days of the world.

Thick vapours, not ascending high but hanging about the earth and covering the surface of it, are commonly called mists; if they ascend high they are termed clouds. They remain upon the earth till they either fall down or are attenuated, rarified, and scattered.

The great mist was not only observable about London, but in remote parts of England, and as we hear, in Holland, so that it was of larger extent than mists are commonly apprehended to be; most men conceiving that they reach not much beyond the places where they behold them. Mists make an obscure air, but they beget not darkness, for the atoms and particles thereof admit the light, but if the matter thereof be very thick, close, and condensed, the mist grows considerably obscure and like a cloud, so the miraculous and palpable darkness of Egypt is conceived to have been effected by an extraordinary dense and dark mist or a kind of cloud spread over the land of Egypt, and also miraculously restrained from the neighbour land of Goshen.