AVith reference to the texts referred to above, -w Inch compare the watchful and sustaining care of his peo- ple by the Almighty with that exhibited by the eagle in training its young ones to fly, especially the spirited one in Deut. xxxii, 11, 12 —
" As an eagle will rouse his nest ; Over liis fledgelings will hover; AVill spread his «ings,\Vill take it [i. e. his brood, or each
of the young] ; Will bear it upon his pinions :
[So] .Jehovah, he alone would guide him [i. e. Israel] ; And there was not with him a strange gud"—
we may quote a passage from Sir Humphrey Davy, who says, " I once saw a very interesting siglit above one of the crags of Ben Nevis, as I was going in the I)ursuit of black game. Two parent eagles were teach- ing their offspring, two young birds, the mana-uvres of flight. Tliey began by rising from the top of the mountain, in the eye of the sun. It was about mid- day, and bright for this climate. They at first made small circles, and the young birds imitated them. They paused on their wings, waiting till they had made their first flight, and then took a second and larger gyration, always rising towards the sun, and enlarging their circle of flight so as to make a gradu- ally ascending spiral. The young ones still and slow- I3' followed, apparently flying Iietter as they mount- ed; and they continued this sublime exercise, always rising, till they became mere points in the air, and the young ones were lost, and afterwards their parents, to our aching sight." The expression in Exod. and Deut., "beareth them on her wings," has been under- stood by Rabbinical writers and others to mean that the eagle does actually carry her young ones on her wings and shoulders. This is putting on the words a construction which they by no means are intended to convey ; at the same time, it is not improbable that
EAGLE
EAGLE
the parent bird assists the first efforts of her j'oung by flying under them, thus sustaining them for a moment, and encouraging them in their eurl^- lessons. (Comp. ^lian, ^*(WH. ii, 40 ; Omnau, C'/jneff. iii, Uo ; Jerome in Jesa. xlvi ; Naumann, Naturgesch. d. Vogel, i, 215 ; on the contrary, Aristotle, Anim. ix, 22.)
Finally, "the eagle was an Assyrian emblem, and hsnce probably the refer- ence in Hab. i, 8. The eagle-headed deity of the Assj'rian sculptures is that of the god Nisroch (q. v.); and in the representations of battles trained birds of this order are f.cquently shown accompanying the Assj^rian warriors in their
g away with the attacks, and in one case uf tliose slain in bearing off the entrails of
Eagle flyin Kutrails
Battle— From the Assyri- the slain. From the As- an Monuments. • ^i c ti. i
sj'rians the use of the eagle
as a standard (q. v.) descended to the Persians, and from them i)robably to the Romans. See Wemyss, Symhul. Diet. s. V. The following scientific descrip- tions are chiefly from Kitto and Smith, s. v.
2. The eagle, in zoology, forms a family of several genera of birds of prey, mostly distinguished for their size, courage, powers of flight, and arms for attack. The bill is strong, and bent into a plain pointed hook, without the notch in the inner curve which character- izes falcons ; the nostrils are covered with a naked cere or skin of a yellow or a blue color ; the eyes are lateral, sunken, or placed beneath an overhanging brow ; the head and neck covered with abundance of longish, narrow-pointetl feathers ; the chest broad, and the legs and thighs exceedingly stout and sinewy. Eagles, properly so called, constitute the genus Aqiiila, and have the tarsi feathered down to the toes ; they are clothed in general with brownish and rust-colored feathers, and the tail is black, .gre}', or deep brown. Sea-eagles (genus Hnliatus) have the tarsi or legs half bare and covered with horny scales ; not unusually the head, back, and tail more or less white. The larger species of both measure, from head to tip of tail, 3 feet G inches or more, and spread their wings above 7 feet G inches ; but these are proportionably broad to thair length, for it is the third quill feather which is the longest, as if the Creator intended to re- strain within bounds their rapidity of flight, while by their breadth the power of continuing on the wing is little or not at all impeded. The claws of the fore and hind toe are particularly strong and sliarp ; in the sea-eagles tliey form more than half a circle, and in length measiu'e from 1^ to If of an inch. These ma- jestic birds have tlieir abode in Europe, on the shores of the Jlediterranean, in Syria and Arabia, wlierever there are vast woodj' mountains and loftj^ clift's ; they occupy each a single district, alwaj's by pairs, except- ing on the coasts, where the sea-eagle and. the? osprey (Pandlon k;duetu-s) m;i}' be found not remote from the region possessed by the rougli-legged eagles — the first because it seeks to subsist on the industry of the sec- ond, and does not interfere with the prej' of the third. It is in this last genus, most generally represented by the golden eagle {Aquila chn/sn'ta) that the most pow- erful and largest birds are found. Tliat species in its more juvenile plumage, known as the ring-tailed eagle, the imperial eagle, or mogilnick (A. heiiacn), andthe booted eagle (/l.pmwato), is found in Syria; and at least one species of the sea-eaj^les (the Hal. ossifrof/us, albicilla, or albicandiis) frequents the coasts, "and is even of stronger wing than the others. These build usually in the cliff's of Phoenicia, wliile the others are more commonly domiciliated within the mountains. According to their strength and habits, the former subsist on antelopes, hares, hyrax, bustard, stork, tor- toises, and serpents \ and the latter usually live on