Note 3 — IV.—PORTENTS OR OMENS, AUGURIES, LUCKY NUMBERS AND DREAMS.

and Spencer speaks of it as the bird “that whoso heares doth die.” Butler, in his Hudibras, p. 2. Canto III. l. 707, refers to the lustration which Rome underwent because an owl had strayed into the capital. Bourne describes it as “a most abominable and unlucky bird,” whose hoarse and dismal voice “is an omen of the approach of some terrible thing: that some dire calamity and some great misfortune is near at hand.” Brand devotes several pages to quotations, ancient and modern, in the same sense.3 Now let us see what the Chinese have to say of the bird of Minerva. “The voice of the owl is universally heard with dread, being regarded as the harbinger of death in the neighbourhood.” I shall perhaps be pardoned if, for the sake of making this notice exhaustive, I quote the following from Mr. Doolittle’s interesting chapter on this and kindred subjects.