Note 19 — Chapter LXII

See Liebrecht’s notes on the Avadánas, translated by Stanislas Julien, on page 110 of his “Zur Volkskunde.” He adduces an English popular superstition. “The country people to their sorrow know the Cornish chough, called Pyrrhocorax, to be not only a thief, but an incendiary, and privately to set houses on fire as well as rob them of what they find profitable. It is very apt to catch up lighted sticks, so there are instances of houses being set on fire by its means.” So a parrot sets a house on fire in a story by Arnauld of Carcassès (Liebrecht’s translation of Dunlop’s History of Fiction, p. 203.) Benfey thinks that this idea originally came from Greece (Panchatantra, Vol. I, p. 383.) Cp. also Pliny’s account of the “incendiaria avis in Kuhn’s Herabkunft des Feuers, p. 31.