AUGURY, an ancient mode of divination, which professes to discover the will of heaven, and the se crets of futurity, by attending to the motions and voices of birds. This superstitious art was called by the Greeks 401k,, or Oseimersxn, or Zuotycoorox ; the derivation of which words is sufficiently obvious. The origin of the term augury is not so clearly as certained. Festus and others have derived it ex aviunz gestu, vel garritu, from the flight or chirping of birds. Among the many strange conjectures which etymologists have proposed on this subject, we are surprised that none of them have ever thought of axis and quvro, or of axis and Car, the name of the person who, according to some authors, was the first teacher of the art, and from whom his posterity the Carians learned it. Or why may it not be from the Chaldaic rem, the soothsayers who cut up and in spected•the victims ? We are rather disposed, ever, to derive the word augury from another source, which has been overlooked augury all the authors whom we have consulted, viz. the Hebrew niV (60-ur) o signifying a swallow or crane; a name which might be formed by oizomatoprea, from their peculiar cry ; but which we rather think is.a derivative of the verb to sojourn ; or to return home. These birds of passage appear to have been among the first to impress mankind with a conviction of their Supe rior sagacity, be.. use, at intervals wisely chosen and accurately measured, they disappear from their tem porary habitations, and revisit them when the genial spring puts forth its buds, and awakes the voice of the turtle. It was remarked by IElian, that they recognise their former nests as readily as men know their accustomed dwellings„(m icettreoy ixacror xcamv .'zvayredg4siv, ;1y 170 ocxzoo aragtoroc.) And the prophet Jeremiah, (viii. 7.) indignantly lamenting the insen sibility of his countrymen, says, " The stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times ; and the turtle, and the crane, and the swallow, observe the time of their coming ; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord." This circumstance, as well as the
mournful twittering of these timorous and perpetual ly agitated birds, might inspire a belief that their de parture was portentous of desolation, their approach the harbinger of gladness, and their agonising scream the sure prognostic of woe. And might not the name of these ominous creatures be readily transfer red to the diviner, who ventured occasionally to visit the unseen regions of Erebus, and who, in accents more dismal than the horrific note of the owl, or the ear-piercing shriek of the bittern, muttered out his pretended expositions of the mysteries of fate ? We do not pretend to know where the art of au gury took its rise. It was held in the highest esti mation by the Phrygians, the Arabians, the Lycians, and all the Asiatics. The Cilicians, Pisidians, and Pampbilians in particular, (as we are told by Cicero,) regarded it as the surest mode of predicting the things to come. It was cultivated also by the Athe nians, the Lacedemonians, and other Grecian states ; • and even the schools of philosophy, with scarcely an exception, gave implicit credit to its rules. The Romans borrowed it from the Etrurians, who said that it was revealed to them by Tages, a supernatu ral being of earthly extraction, who sprung out of a furrow, and instructed the astonished rustics in the profound arcana of the invisible world. By an an cient law of the Roman senate, it was decreed, that no measure of importance should be undertaken with out consulting the Tuscan augurs ; and whenever any prodigy occurred, it was customary to send a mission into Etruria, to obtain a solution of the phenomenon. These embassies, however, equally hazardous and in convenient, were very far from giving satisfaction. It was therefore thought expedient to send six, or, according to other accounts, ten of the noble youth to Fesulm, to be initiated in the principles of the art at the seminary of augurs.