Isn't this amazing?
The Roman satirist Juvenal wrote in 82 AD of "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ('a rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan').
He meant something whose rarity would compare with that of a black swan, or in other words, as a black swan did not exist, neither did the supposed characteristics of the ‘rare bird’ with which it was being compared.
The phrase passed into several European languages as a popular proverb, including English, in which the first four words (a rare bird in the land) are often used ironically. For some 1500 years the black swan existed in the European imagination as a metaphor for that which could not exist....
The Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh made the first European record of sighting a Black Swan in 1697 when he sailed into, and named, the Swan River on the western coast of New Holland. The sighting was significant in Europe where "all swans are white" had long been used as a standard example of a well-known truth.
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