NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works - Holy Bible Institute

The creation of fowl and water animals.crows, serving them as escort, go to bring them back, and to help them against the attacksof hostile birds. The proof is that in this season not a single crow appears, and that theyreturn with wounds, evident marks of the help and of the assistance that they have lent.Who has explained to them the laws of hospitality? Who has threatened them with thepenalties of desertion? For not one is missing from the company. Listen, all inhospitablehearts, ye who shut your doors, whose house is never open either in the winter or in thenight to travellers. The solicitude of storks for their old would be sufficient, if our childrenwould reflect upon it, to make them love their parents; because there is no one so failing ingood sense, as not to deem it a shame to be surpassed in virtue by birds devoid of reason.The storks surround their father, when old age makes his feathers drop off, warm him withtheir wings, and provide abundantly for his support, and even in their flight they help himas much as they are able, raising him gently on each side upon their wings, a conduct sonotorious that it has given to gratitude the name of “antipelargosis.” 1664 Let no one lamentpoverty; let not the man whose house is bare despair of his life, when he considers the industryof the swallow. To build her nest, she brings bits of straw in her beak; and, as she cannotraise the mud in her claws, she moistens the end of her wings in water and then rolls in veryfine dust and thus procures mud. 1665 After having united, little by little, the bits of strawwith this mud, as with glue, she feeds her young; and if any one of them has its eyes injured,she has a natural remedy to heal the sight of her little ones. 1666This sight ought to warn you not to take to evil ways on account of poverty; and, evenif you are reduced to the last extremity, not to lose all hope; not to abandon yourself to inactionand idleness, but to have recourse to God. If He is so bountiful to the swallow, whatwill He not do for those who call upon Him with all their heart?The halcyon is a sea bird, which lays its eggs along the shore, or deposits them in thesand. And it lays in the middle of winter, when the violence of the winds dashes the seaagainst the land. Yet all winds are hushed, and the wave of the sea grows calm, during theseven days that the halcyon sits. 16671664 From πελαργός. On the pious affection of the stork, cf. Plato, Alc. i. 135 (§ 61), Arist., H.A. ix. 13, 20,Ælian, H.A. iii. 23 and x. 16, and Plin. x. 32. From πελαργὸς was supposed to be derived the Pythagorean wordπελαργᾶν (Diog. Laert. viii. 20), but this is now regarded as a corruption of πεδαρτᾶν.1665 “Hirundines luto construunt, stramine roborant: si quando inopia est luti, madefactæ multa aqua pennispulverem spargunt.” Plin. x. 49. cf. Arist., Hist. An. ix. 10.1666 “Chelidoniam visui saluberriman hirundines monstravere, vexatis pullorum oculis illa medentes.” Plin.viii. 41. cf. Ælian, H.A. iii. 25. Chelidonia is swallowwort or celandine.1667 “Fœtificant bruma, qui dies halcyonides vocantur, placido mari per eos et navigabili, Siculo maxime. Plin.x. 47. cf. Arist., H.A. v. 8, 9, and Ælian, H. N. i. 36. So Theoc. vii. 57: Χ᾽ ἁλκυόνες στορεσεῦντι τὰ κύματα, τάντε θάλασσαν Τόν τε νότον τόντ᾽ εὖρον ὃς ἔσχατα φυκία κινεῖ Sir Thomas Browne (Vulgar Errors) denies theuse of a kingfisher as a weather-gauge, but says nothing as to the “halcyon days.” Kingfishers are rarely seen in338