Excerpt from The New Book of Birds: An Album of Natural History The Israelites must have seen them during their long march through the wilderness; and centuries later, the Prophet writers, when they wanted to describe the fate of a thriving city laid waste and all its people gone, pictured it as a haunt of Ostriches - the birds that love loneliness and open spaces.1 Their doleful cry, too, was noticed. This has been said by African travellers to be easily mistaken for the lion's roar, but Canon Tristram, who travelled widely in Scripture lands, says: To my own ear it sounded more like the hoarse lowing of an ox in pain. Later on, the Romans got to know of this stately bird, and no doubt it was one of the myriad of wild creatures which from time to time were captured, and sent to Rome for exhibition in the arena. Its plumes must have ornamented many a fan and fly-whisk in rich men's houses. And certain foolish gluttons, priding themselves on being givers of costly dinners, made of its brains a dainty dish that for awhile set people talking. We are told that one of the Emperors, the extravagant and ignoble Heliogabalus, had no less than six hundred Ostriches driven together and shot down to furnish one dish - one of those acts of wicked waste that were all too common in Imperial Rome. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.