dition of millet, radish, cabbage, lettuce and
plantain-seeds, and sometimes a few bruised melon-seeds or barberries."
Nightingales, he says, should be fed on meal, worms, and fresh ants'
eggs: but, if it is not possible to get these, a mixture of hard egg,
ox-heart minced, and white bread may be given; but this often kills the
birds. No such food would do for Noah's nightingales, then, or where
would have been the nightingale's song? They must have been fed on meal,
worms, and _fresh_ ant's eggs. How they were obtained, we have, of
course, no knowledge. Bechstein says that larks may be fed with "a paste
made of grated carrot, white bread soaked in water, and barley or wheat
meal, all worked together in a mortar. In addition to this paste, larks
should be supplied with poppy-seed, bruised hemp, crumb of bread, and
plenty of greens, such as lettuce, endive, cabbage, with a little lean
meat or ant-eggs occasionally." He says the cage should be furnished
with a piece of fresh turf, often renewed, and great attention should be
paid to cleanliness. The care of the birds in the ark probably fell to
the women. As they had not read Bechstein, or any other author on
bird-keeping,--and thousands of the birds must have been total strangers
to them,--how did they know what diet to supply them with, and where
could they get it, supposing they had time to supply them at all?

If the difficulty was great to keep the birds of a temperate climate,
how much greater must it have been to keep tropical birds in a climate
altogether unsuited to them? The two birds of paradise bought by Wallace
were fed, he says, on rice, bananas, and cockroaches: of the last, he
obtained several cans from a bake-house at Malta, and thus got his
paradise birds, by good fortune, to England. But how many cans of
cockroaches would be necessary for two hundred and fifty-two of such
birds,--the number in the ark? and where were the bake-houses from which
the supply might be obtained?

To keep this vast menagerie clean would have required a large corps of
efficient workers, especially when we remember that there was but one
door in each story, as some suppose; or one door to the whole ark, as
the story seems to teach, and this door was closed; and but one window,
and that apparently in the roof. The Augean stable, the cleansing of
which was one of the labors of Hercules, can but faintly indicate what
must have been the condition of the ark in less than a month, sup