Crow.

Portrait of the Crow in a Roundel.

Portrait of the Crow in a Roundel.

Text Translation:

Of the crow The crow is a long-lived bird, called cornix in Latin and Greek. Soothsayers assert that the crow can represent by signs the concerns of men, show where an ambush is laid and foretell the future. It is a great crime to believe this – that God confides his intentions to crows. Among the many omens attributed to crows is that of presaging by their caws the coming of rain. Hence the line: ‘Then the crow loudly cries for rain’ (Virgil, Georgics, 1, 388).

Another strike against the christian god. What’s wrong with confiding in crows?

Let men learn from the crow’s example and its sense of duty, to love their children. Crows follow their young in flight, escorting them attentively; they feed them anxiously in case they weaken. A very long time passes before they give up their responsibility for feeding their offspring. In contrast, women of our human race wean their babies as soon as they can, even the ones they love. Rich women are altogether averse to breastfeeding. If the women are poor, they cast out their infants, expose them and, when the babies are found, deny all knowledge of them. The rich themselves also kill their children in the womb, to avoid dividing their estate among many heirs; and with murderous concoctions they destroy in the uterus the children of their own womb; they would rather take away life than transmit it. What creature but man has taken the view that children can be renounced? What creature but man has endowed parents with such barbarous rights? What creature but man, in the brotherhood created by nature, has made brothers unequal? Different fates befall the sons of a single rich man. One enjoys in abundance the rights and titles of his father’s entire heritage; the other complains bitterly at receiving an exhausted and impoverished share of his rich patrimony. Did nature distinguish between what each son should receive? Nature has shared things equally among everyone, giving them what they need to be born and survive. Let nature teach you to make no distinction, when dividing your patrimony, between those whom you have made equal by the title bestowed by brotherhood; for truly as you have bestowed on them the equal possession of the fact of their birth, so you should not grudge them the equal enjoyment of their status of brotherhood.

Folio 58r – the quail, continued. De cornice ; Of the crow.

Word Wednesday.

We have two words today, because they are both from the same book, and I did not wish to choose between them.
 

Salubrious / Obliquity

 
Salubrious, adjective: favourable to or promoting health or well-being.

-salubriously, adverb.

-salubriousness, noun.

-salubrity, noun.

[Origin: Latin salubris; akin to salvus safe, healthy.]

(1547)

“Bloomsbury to the north and Soho to the west were far from salubrious parts of London, but St. Giles’s remained one of the worst blackspots on the London map until the 1890s.” – Rivals of the Ripper: Unsolved Murders of Women in Late Victorian London, Jan Bondeson.

Obliquity, noun, plural -ties.

1: deviation from moral rectitude or sound thinking.

2a: deviation from parallelism or perpendicularity; also: the amount of such a deviation. b: the angle between the planes of the earth’s equator and orbit having a value of about 23°27′.

3a: indirectness or deliberate obscurity of speech or conduct. b: an obscure or confusing statement.

[Origin: Middle French obliquité from Latin obliquitatem slanting direction, obliquity.]

(15th Century)

“The Era newspaper blamed the police for their hounding of Smith and insisted that ‘the mental obliquity and professional incapacity displayed by the police in getting up the case against Smith, for the Cannon Street murder, shows more than ever the absolute necessity that exists for the establishment of a public prosecutor’. – Rivals of the Ripper: Unsolved Murders of Women in Late Victorian London, Jan Bondeson.

These two words definitely do not belong together, but I love the way they sound together: Salubrious Obliquity.

Quail.

Portrait of the quail. This rather characterless and legless portrait shows the correct tawny colour of the quail but is the wrong shape. The quail has a plump body and minimal tail.

Portrait of the quail. This rather characterless and legless portrait shows the correct tawny colour of the quail but is the wrong shape. The quail has a plump body and minimal tail.

Text Translation:

Of the quail Quails are so called from their call; the Greeks call them ortigie because they were first seen on the island of Ortigia. Quails have fixed times of migration. For when summer gives way to winter, they cross the sea. The leader of the flock is called ortigometra, ‘the quail-mother’. The hawk, seeing the quail-mother approaching land, seizes it; because of this, the quails all take care to attract a leader from another species, through whom they guard against this early danger. Their favorite food is the seed of poisonous plants. For this reason, the ancients forbade them to be eaten; for alone among living things, the quail suffers, like man, from the falling sickness.

[Read more…]

Landor’s Cottage.

The Illustrations to Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allen Poe, by Harry Clarke, 1919.  Click for full size. The second image is the Finis. This is the end of the black and white illustrations. There are eight colour plates, however I don’t know which stories they belong to, so anyone’s guess.

Caladrius.

A caladrius looks towards a sick king, indicating that he will recover.

A caladrius looks towards a sick king, indicating that he will recover.

Text Translation:

[Of the caladrius] The bird called caladrius, as Physiologus tells us, is white all over; it has no black parts. Its excrement cures cataract in the eyes. It is to be found in royal residences. If anyone is sick, he will learn from the caladrius if he is to live or die. If, therefore, a man’s illness is fatal, the caladrius will turn its head away from the sick man as soon as it sees him, and everyone knows that the man is going to die. But if the man’s sickness is one from which he will recover, the bird looks him in the face and takes the entire illness upon itself; it flies up into the air, towards the sun, burns off the sickness and scatters it, and the sick man is cured.

The caladrius represents our Saviour. Our Lord is pure white without a trace of black, ‘who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth’ (1 Peter, 2:22). The Lord, moreover, coming from on high, turned his face from the Jews, because they did not believe, and turned to us, Gentiles, taking away our weakness and carrying our sins; raised up on the wood of the cross and ascending on high, ‘he led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men, (Ephesians, 4:8). Each day Christ, like the caladrius, attends us in our sickness, examines our mind when we confess, and heals those to whom he shows the grace of repentance. But he turns his face away from those whose heart he knows to be unrepentant. These he casts off; but those to whom he turns his face, he makes whole again. But, you say, because the caladrius is unclean accoording to the law, it ought not to be likened to Christ. Yet John says of God: ‘And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up’ (4:14); and according to the law, ‘the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field’ (Genesis, 3:1). The lion and the eagle are unclean, yet they are likened to Christ, because of their royal rank
because the lion is king of the beasts; the eagle, king of the birds.

Folio 57r – the caladrius, continued.