Cultivated plants and domestic animals.. by Helm Victor

Author:Helm, Victor. [from old catalog]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: [n. p.]
Published: 1891-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

pressions are found in old German codes of laws, and though the falcon is there mentioned as a tame hunting-bird, that does not prove its Old German origin. The name of the true German hunting-bird habicht (havoc, hawk), proves on the contrary that it came from Gaul; in Old Irish it is sebocc, and must have had that or a similar sound in the oldest Celtic. In one of the two branches of Celtic, namely, the British, the s of many words was transformed into h ; in the Cambro-Cornish dialect sebocc became hebanc, and the word passed to the Germans in this secondary form, Old High German hafiuh, Old Norse haukr, etc. The Germans of the very earliest times fought the bear and wolf, and hunted the auer-ox and bison, the elk, the schelch, and the wild-boar \ but they became acquainted with the art of hawking much later from over the Rhine and the Danube. It cannot be affirmed that this kind of hunting ever became national in Germany : it was practised by noble knights and ladies on horseback, followed by a troop of servitors; the peasant never went hawking; he stared at the outlandish pastime of the gentles, as he marvelled at the knight's weapons and manner of fighting, and gradually learnt to pronounce the Romance names of these things. It is another question whether the Celtic nations that surrounded the Germanic world to the south and west, invented hawking or only developed the art, and, in the last case, whence they originally derived it. The most ancient mention of hawking or hunting with trained birds is found in Aristotle: " In the district once called Kedreipolis in Thrace, the small birds in the marshes are hunted by men in company with hawks ; the men beat the reeds and bushes to drive out the birds, which fly up, but are pursued by the hawks, and fly down again in alarm, whereupon they are beaten with sticks and picked up by the men, who give the hawks a share of the booty." Certain Thracians, therefore, used a tame bird of prey to frighten the game down in marshy districts; these birds of prey did not catch the game themselves, but received their portion of the booty, just as in the later European falconry. Philo the Jew repeats the above account in a dialogue preserved in an Armenian translation, but adds: "The history of the Thracian hawk seemed doubtful to me till I questioned several

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