These
superstitions must have been very general among the ancients, and were
not confined to the Greeks and Romans. Some of the Asiatic nations still
wear the skin of the Kingfisher about their persons, as a protection
against both moral and physical evils; the feathers are used as
love-charms; and it is believed, that, if the body of the Kingfisher be
evenly fixed upon a pivot, it will turn its head to the north, like the
magnetic needle.
This bird is singularly grotesque in his appearance, though not without
beauty of plumage. With his long, straight, and quadrangular bill, his
short and diminutive feet and legs, and his immense head, his plumage
of a handsome dusky blue, with a bluish band on the breast and a white
collar around the neck,--when this mixture of the grotesque and the
beautiful is considered in connection with the singularity of his
habits, we need not marvel at the superstitions connected with his
history. He sits patiently, like an angler, on a post at the head of a
wharf, or on a branch of a tree that extends over the bank, and, leaning
obliquely, with extended head and beak, he watches for his finny prey.
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