n this
passage the old error as to the cloven hoofs and the mane is repeated. It
is added that the animal will not endure captivity; but if any one is
snared by means of ropes, he refuses to eat or drink. That this latter
statement is fabulous, is proved by the hippopotamus taken alive to
Constantinople, and by the very tame animal now in the Zoological Garden.

The fable about the hippopotamus destroying its father and violating its
mother, cited before from Damascius, is to be found in Plutarch, _De
Solert. Anim._, c. 4. Pausan. (viii. 46. Sec. 4.) mentions a Greek statue, in
which the face was made of the teeth of the hippopotamus instead of ivory.

An interesting account of the younger hippopotamus in the Zoological
Garden, by Professor Owen, may be seen in the _Annals and Magazine of
Natural History_ for June last.

L.

* * * * *

PARALLEL PASSAGES: COLERIDGE, HOOKER, BUTLER.

I do not remember to have seen the following parallels pointed out.

Coleridge. _The Nightingale. A conversation poem:_

"The nightingale--
'Most musical, most melancholy' bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
. . . . he, and such as he,
First named these notes a melancholy strain."

Plato Phaedo, Sec. 77. (p. 85., Steph.):

"Men, because they fear death themselves, slander the swans, and say
that they sing from pain lamenting their death, and do not consider
that no bird sings when hungry, or cold, or suffering any other pain;
no, not even the nightingale, and the swallow, and the hoopoe, which
you know are said to sing for grief," &c.

* * * * *

Hooker, E. P. I. c.5. Sec. 2.:

"All things therefore coveting as much as may be to be like unto God in
being ever, that which cannot hereunto attain personally doth seek to
continue itself another way, that is, by offspring and propagation."

Clem. Alex. Strom. II. 23. Sec. 138. (p. 181. Sylb.)

Sir J. Davies. _Immortality of the Soul_, sect 7.:

"And though the soul could cast spiritual seed,
Yet would she not, because she never dies;
For mortal things desire their like to breed,
That so they may their kind immortalise."

{459}

Plato Sympos. Sec.32. (p. 207. D. Steph.):

"Morta