prey when no better may be had, and Bruce gives an anecdote of its pertinacity and audacity on one of these occasions so graphically, that it would be unjust to the reader to give it in other than the slandered Abyssinian traveller's own words:

Upon the highest top of the mountain Lamalmon, while my servants were refreshing themselves from that toilsome, rugged ascent, and enjoying the pleasure of a most delightful climate, eating their dinner in the outer air, with several large dishes of boiled goat's flesh before them, this enemy, as he turned out to be to them, appeared suddenly. He did not stoop rapidly from a height, but came flying slowly along the ground, and sat down close to the meat, within the ring the men had made round it. A great shout, or rather cry of distress, called me to the place. I saw the eagle stand for a minute, as if to recollect himself, while the servants ran for their lances and shields. I walked up as near to him as I had time to do. His attention was fully fixed upon the flesh. I saw him put his foot into the pan, where was a large piece in water, prepared for boiling; but finding the smart which he had not expected, he withdrew it, and forsook this piece which he held.

There were two large pieces, a leg and a shoulder, lying upon a wooden platter; into these he trussed both his claws, and carried them off; but I thought he looked wistfully at the large piece which remained in the warm water. Away he went slowly along the ground as he had come. The face of the cliff over which criminals are thrown took him from our sight. The Mahometans that drove the asses, who had suffered from the hyæna, were much alarmed, and assured me of his return. My servants, on the other hand, very unwillingly expected him, and thought he had already more than his share.

As I had myself a desire of more intimate acquaintance with him, I loaded a rifle gun with ball and sat down close to the platter by the meat. It was not many minutes before he came, and a prodigious shout was raised by my attendants, He is coming! he is coming!' enough to have discouraged a less courageous animal. Whether he was not quite so hungry as at first, or suspected something from my appearance, I know not, but he made a small turn and sat down about ten yards from me, the pan with the meat being between me and him. As the field was clear before me, and I did not know but his next move might bring him opposite to one of my people, and so that he might actually get the rest of the meat and make off, I shot him with

the ball through the middle of his body, about two inches below the wing, so that he lay down upon the grass without a single flutter.

Bruce gives the following dimensions of this daring bird:

From wing to wing he was eight feet four inches; from the tip of his tail to the point of his beak, when dead, four feet seven inches; he weighed twenty-two pounds, and was very full of flesh.

But return we to our condor. It affords pregnant evidence of the care and attention exerted by the authorities and keepers of the animals confined in the garden of the Zoological Society of London in the Regent's Park, when we find that so many of them have not only shown a disposition to breed in their captivity, but that not a few have actually reared healthy offspring, under all the disadvantages which a life so different from that intended by Nature must, under any circumstances, produce. Some of these instances, if our notes find favour in your eye, dear reader, will be hereafter given. At present we beg attention to one where, with every wish to continue the species, the parents seemed to give up incubation as hopeless.

At the time the present note was taken the female condor in the Regent's Park had laid seven eggs. The first was laid on the 4th of March, 1844; the second on the 29th of April of the same year; the third on the 28th of February, 1845; the fourth on the 24th of April in that year; the fifth on the 8th of February, 1846; the sixth on the 3rd of April, 1846; and the seventh on the 7th of May, 1847.

On one occasion I saw the condors with a newly-laid white egg, some three or four inches long, lying on the naked floor of their prison. There was no appearance of a nest of any kind, and there was something melancholy and yet ludicrous in the hopeless expression with which both the parents looked down at it. They regarded the

egg and then each other, as if they would have said if they could, 'What are we to do with it now we have got it?' And the mute mutual answer of their forlorn eyes and dejected heads was, evidently, 'Nothing.'

Well, at last it was proposed that as soon as another egg was laid it should be placed under a hen. Accordingly, on the 7th of May, at half-past seven o'clock, A.M. (I must be pardoned for being somewhat particular on such an occasion), the newly-laid egg was put under a good motherly-looking nurse of the Dorking breed, and as the colours of hens as well as of horses are worthy of note, let it be remembered that her colour was white inclining to buff.

The place of incubation was a cage elevated some distance above the floor in one of the aviaries. The hen sat very close. Day after day, week after week, passed away; still the excellent nurse continued to sit. Day after day, week after week again rolled on, and the usual period at which the anxious feathered mother beholds her natural offspring was left far behind. Still the good nurse sat on, till at last, after an incubation of fifty-four days, the young condor, on the 30th of June, 1846, about six o'clock in the morning, began to break the wall of its procreant prison. The process of hatching was very slow. The young bird was not extricated from the egg until after twenty-seven hours, nor was it then released -on the morning of the 1st of July—without the assistance of the keeper, who found it necessary to remove the shell, as the membrane had got dry round the nestling. Thus came into this best of all possible worlds the first condor hatched in England. It had an odd appearance, and seemed to wonder how it had got here. The head appeared to be misshapen, for on the top of it was what looked like an amorphous bladder of water, contained between the external skin and the skull. This gradually disappeared, and when I first saw it, on the same 1st of

July, about four o'clock in the afternoon, the head was properly shaped. It was naked, and of a dark lead colour; and such was the hue of the just visible comb (showing that it was a male), and of the naked feet. With these exceptions the young bird was covered with a dirty white down, and looked healthy and vigorous. On the evening of the day on which it was hatched it ate part of the liver of a young rabbit.

The young condor was fed five times each day with the fleshy parts of young rabbits; at each feed, a piece about the size of a walnut was given, and it was very fond of the liver. For the first ten days it was fed, and after that time it pecked the food from the hand of the keeper. It took no water, nor was any forced on it.

I find, also, the following in my note-book :

July 18.-The young condor continues to thrive apace, and the good hen that hatched the egg from which this portentous chick sprung still remains in the elevated cage, and seems very much attached to her charge. When feeding, for which purpose she quits the nestling only twice a-day, hurrying back as if anxious to resume her duty—she is fussy and fidgetty (if there be such words) till her hasty meals are ended. The young condor's down is now changed to a more grey hue, and the germs of the true feathers begin to show themselves. The head and neck have become blacker, and the budding excrescence of the comb advances. The upper mandible of the bill is slightly moveable. The lower extremities are become darker and very stout, but as yet too weak to support the bird's weight.

May not this local, but no doubt natural weakness, point to the solution of the continued close attention of the hen? Her duty with her own eggs is to hatch chickens that run very soon after they have left the eggshell, but till they are strong enough to be able to trust to their lower extremities she keeps them close, 'hiving

them,' as the old wives say, carefully, till these lower extremities, which are, in the nestlings of the gallinaceous tribe, first well developed, shall be sufficiently strong to carry them in search of food and out of danger. The hen, in this instance, finds that her Garagantua of a chick cannot walk, and therefore goes on cherishing it and sitting close over it. I saw it fed about three o'clock in the afternoon upon part of a young rabbit, nearly the whole of which it had consumed in the course of yesterday and to-day. When brought out it shivered its callow wings and opened its mouth like other nestlings, but it then uttered no cry. It made much use of the tongue in taking the food and in deglutition.

On my return from making these observations I went to look at the old condors. Military bands were playing, and the wind was very high. Both birds were very much excited, the male especially. He spread and flapped his wings, pursuing the female, as she walked backwards from him, with his beak opposite and close to hers, and gesticulating vehemently and oddly.

The next entry is a sad one :

July 21, 1846.—The young condor, after thriving well to all appearance, died this morning. The good hen, which had been most attentive to it to the last, seemed to miss it much. The cry of the young condor resembled the squeak of a rat, and the dwelling-place of the hen and her charge was infested by those predaceous rodents. Sometimes they would squeak, and then the bereaved foster-mother would approach the hole whence the squeak proceeded, listen, and abide there clucking, as if in hope of seeing her charge come forth.

In this case I was struck with the modification of instinct, or rather of the adjunct of something closely resembling a reasoning power, on the part of the hen. In general, as soon as the days of her incubation are fulfilled the hen leaves the nest, if the eggs are addled, or have