Two shelves teach the language two ways. Melampus is schooled by gratitude: his servants kill the old snakes, he rears the young, and as he slept “they purged his ears with their tongues” — he wakes and “understood the voices of the birds flying overhead”, and “from what he learned from them he foretold to men what should come to pass” [The Library (Bibliotheca), BOOK I, ch. IX]. The skill is working equipment: imprisoned, he hears the woodworms report the roof-beam nearly gnawed through; freed, “he summoned the birds; and when a vulture came” he learned the cure for Iphiclus’ childlessness [ibid.]. Sigurd is schooled by taste: “the heart-blood of the worm touched his tongue” and “straightway he knew the voice of all fowls” — whose first counsel is the warning “There lies Regin, minded to beguile the man who trusts in him” [The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga), XIX]. That is Thompson’s own Völsungasaga row, verified here by reading; the birds’ verse songs on the same page are the translators’ insertion from Reginsmal, per the endnote, so only prose is quoted. Machine candidates — the Kojiki’s white-bird elegy, a Yoruba color-list — dissolved on reading; Tylor was excluded by work-class. The tuition is always a serpent: tended in Greece, eaten in the north.