My colleague, Professor W. M. Lindsay, invites, or challenges, me to reply to his note on ‘Ciris’ (Class. Quart. XIX., pp. 103, 104); I can but take him at his word.

Professor Lindsay seeks to identify the two birds Haliaetus and Ciris, and finds the task an easy one; he identifies Ciris with a Tern confidently and categorically. We learn (he says) ‘from Gallus' epyllium … that it was a sea-bird with red legs, so rapid in flight that it always evaded the swoop of the sea-eagle. What can this be but a tern?’