not been hatched from some other cause. But here she continued to sit more than double the usual time without moving except for the purpose of taking food. Might it not be that she felt that life was in progress under her, and that her orogyn (storge) prevailed with her not to abandon the embryo till the fulness of its time was come?*

Again I observed that she made no attempt to solicit the young condor to feed, as hens do with their own chickens. She seemed to regard it as something incomprehensible, but belonging to her; and looked on with

*We cannot but admire with Harvey,' says Willughby, some of these natural instincts of birds, viz., that almost all henbirds should, with such diligence and patience, sit upon their nests night and day for a long time together, macerating and almost starving themselves to death; that they should expose themselves to such dangers in defence of their eggs; and if, being constrained, they sometimes leave them a little while, with such earnestness hasten back to them and cover them. Ducks and geese, while they are absent for a little while, diligently cover up their eggs with straw. With what courage and magnanimity do even the most cowardly birds defend their eggs, which sometimes are subventaneous and addle, or not their own, or even artificial ones. Stupendous, in truth, is the love of birds to a dull and lifeless egg, and which is not likely with the least profit or pleasure to recompense so great pains and care. Who can but admire the passionate affection, or rather fury, of a clocking hen, which cannot be extinguished unless she be drenched in cold water? During this impetus of mind she neglects all things, and, as if she were in a frenzy, lets down her wings, and bristles up her feathers, and walks up and down reckless and querulous, puts other hens off their nests, searching everywhere for eggs to sit upon; neither doth she give over till she hath either found eggs to sit or chickens to bring up; which she doth with wonderful zeal and passion, call together, cherish, feed, and defend. What a pretty ridiculous spectacle is it to see a hen following a bastard brood of young ducklings (which she hath hatched for her own) swimming in the water? How she often compasses the place, sometimes venturing in, not without danger, as far as she can wade, and calls upon them, using all her art and industry to allure them to her.'

evident complacency when the keeper took it out to feed it on raw flesh, receiving it, after its meal, under her wings with a comforting cluck.

It is a well-known aphorism that the more perfect the order of the animal is, the larger is the size of its offspring when it first enters into life. Thus, as John Hunter observes, a new-born quadruped is nearer to the size of the parents than a bird just hatched, and a bird nearer than a fish. Something may be, therefore, attributed to the disproportioned bulk of the young condor; but true as the maxim is, it does not follow that the parent has the power of distinguishing size. In birds such a power probably does not exist; for we know that the hedgesparrow and other small birds will go on feeding the enormous young cuckoo till the poor benevolent dupes are almost exhausted, before and after the intruder has shouldered out their own eggs and little nestlings.

The sight of the helpless young condor could not fail to raise reflections in the most unobserving. There was the comparatively minute form, which, if its life had been spared, would have been developed to gigantic proportions; and that little, feeble, plumeless wing, was formed to bear quill-feathers from two to three feet in length. These noble quills are used as pens in the Cordillera; and in this country I have seen them transformed into floats for the angler, of a size and finish to satisfy the most fastidious dandy disciple of good honest Izaak Walton.

Two other raptorial birds come into the group, though one of them, the Californian vulture, wants the caruncle which distinguishes the condor. The other is the king of the vultures.* The brilliant colours of the head and neck of this last project it upon the notice of the visitor who passes the place of its confinement; and there is

* Or, King Vulture-Sarcoramphus Papa-Vultur Papa, Linn.

reason for believing that the stories told of the other vultures, in their free and natural state, standing respectfully aloof till their king has finished his repast, are not groundless, the respect being probably due to the superior courage of the monarch.

Of the condors, two males and one female are now alive in the garden of the society; but no egg has been laid since that whose history we have attempted to give was deposited.

In the same garden the king vulture-this looks very like poor dear Theodore Hook's story of the cock maccaws laying eggs-has laid, but it never sat. The Chinese vulture has done the same, but never attempted incubation. The wedge-tailed eagle of New Holland, and the lämmergeyer sighing for her mate and her mountains, have dropped eggs, but never attempted incubation. The eagle owl* entered upon the business of the continuation of the species with greater energy and gravity. She laid and sat, but sat in vain: not an owlet rewarded her anxiety.

The white-headed eagles seemed very much in earnest. Of them the reader may know more hereafter, if he should choose to kill time by looking upon these pages.

This, we are told, is a world of compensation, though the compensation is too often terribly on one side, as in the often-repeated case of Englishmen being called upon to pay for the vested interests' of a nuisance that would not be tolerated for three months in any city of civilized Europe except London-Smithfield Market, for instance. But still this best of all possible worlds is a world of compensation. In obedience to this law, Mr. Yarrell, in his excellent History of British Birds, has recorded a most interesting account of a buzzard† hatching chickens,

*Strix Bubo.

+ Buteo vulgaris.

in order, no doubt, to balance the fact of a hen hatching a condor.

A solitary male buzzard in our time made desperate love to the shoe of the gardener of the Physic Garden at Oxford, with the gardener's foot in the said shoe; but Mr. Yarrell's story relates to the gentler sex, and he prefaces it with an observation as to the extreme partiality of the common buzzard for the seasonal task of incubation and rearing young birds.

The bird mentioned by Mr. Yarrell was kept in the garden of the Chequers, in the good town of Uxbridge, of ineffectual Treaty memory. The poor bird-she was well known to many a brother of the angle, 'now,' as old Izaak hath it, 'with God'-manifested her inclination to frame a nest by gathering and twisting about all the loose sticks she could lay beak and claw on. The good master of the house had compassion on her, furnished her with twigs and all appliances and means to boot, and the solitary creature went to work and completed a nest. Two hens' eggs were put under her; she hatched them well and reared them bravely. Her desire to sit was indicated by scratching holes in the garden, and breaking and tearing everything within reach of beak and talons. Year after year did she hatch and bring up a goodly troop of chickens, and in 1831 her brood consisted of nine, after the loss of one, for she had brought out ten. Upon one occasion her kind master, to save her from what he thought the ennui of sitting, put down to her a newly-hatched lot-luckless little ones, she destroyed every chick of them. The good man did not know the animal economy, which makes the application of the eggs to the inflamed breast of the female bird a balm, rendering this labour of love twice blessed, and leading in its train all the maternal charities. The ready-made nestlings were treated as intruding impostors; but to her own foster-chicks no honest barn-door chuckie

was ever more attentive: only when flesh was given to her and she broke it up for her young family, she appeared mortified that, after taking a few morsels, they left her and her carrion to pick up the grain with which they were supplied.

Have we not something to answer for in confining God's creatures in solitude, where they cannot fulfil the divine command?

February, 1850.