Daedalus was so proud of his achievements that he could not bear the idea of a rival.  His sister had placed her son Perdix under his charge to be taught the mechanical arts.  He was an apt scholar and gave striking evidences of ingenuity.  Walking on the seashore he picked up the spine of a fish.  Imitating it, he took a piece of iron and notched it on the edge, and thus invented the saw.  He put two pieces of iron together, connecting them at one end with a rivet, and sharpening the other ends, and made a pair of compasses.  Daedalus was so envious of his nepnew’s performances that he took an opportunity, when they were together one day on the top of a high tower, to push him off.  But Minerva, who favors ingenuity, saw him falling, and arrested his fate by changing him into a bird called after his name, the Partridge.  This bird does not build his nest in the trees, nor take lofty flights, but nestles in the hedges, and mindful of his fall, avoids high places.

The death of Icarus is told in the following lines by Darwin: 

“... with melting wax and loosened strings Sunk hapless Icarus on unfaithful wings; Headlong he rushed through the affrighted air, With limbs distorted and dishevelled hair; His scattered plumage danced upon the wave, And sorrowing Nereids decked his watery grave; O’er his pale corse their pearly sea-flowers shed, And strewed with crimson moss his marble bed; Struck in their coral towers the passing bell, And wide in ocean tolled his echoing knell.”

CASTOR AND POLLUX

Castor and Pollux were the offspring of Leda and the Swan, under which disguise Jupiter had concealed himself.  Leda gave birth to an egg from which sprang the twins.  Helen, so famous afterwards as the cause of the Trojan war, was their sister.

When Theseus and his friend Pirithous had carried off Helen from Sparta, the youthful heroes Castor and Pollux, with their followers, hastened to her rescue.  Theseus was absent from Attica and the brothers were successful in recovering their sister.

Castor was famous for taming and managing horses, and Pollux for skill in boxing.  They were united by the warmest affection and inseparable in all their enterprises.  They accompanied the Argonautic expedition.  During the voyage a storm arose, and Orpheus prayed to the Samothracian gods, and played on his harp, whereupon the storm ceased and stars appeared on the heads of the brothers.  From this incident, Castor and Pollux came afterwards to be considered the patron deities of seamen and voyagers, and the lambent flames, which in certain states of the atmosphere play round the sails and masts of vessels, were called by their names.

After the Argonautic expedition, we find Castor and Pollux engaged in a war with Idas and Lynceus.  Castor was slain, and Pollux, inconsolable for the loss of his brother, besought Jupiter to be permitted to give his own life as a ransom for him.  Jupiter so far consented as to allow the two brothers to enjoy the boon of life alternately, passing one day under the earth and the next in the heavenly abodes.  According to another form of the story, Jupiter rewarded the attachment of the brothers by placing them among the stars as Gemini the Twins.