Genre:

Essay, Drollery

Subjects:

Zoology, Comparative Philology, Miracle, Geology

    Discusses a familiar limerick describing how the sister of a 'Old Tailor of Bicester' was carried away by 'a bird called a Jay'. Pondering the plausibility of this event, remarks that at one time 'we began to reflect that the age of miracles was past, and that for a bird called a jay—which we had seen among our noble father's ancestral woods, and also at the Zoological Gardens [...] to carry away a maiden, would be a marvel for which even an anti-Mosaic geologist would hardly have swallow enough'.