stroyed, as they were sure to rouse us with the earliest dawn.

“I shall here particularize the routine of one of our days, which will serve as an example of all the rest. I usually rise when I hear the merry laugh of the Laughing Jackass (Dacelo gigantea), which, from its regularity, has been not unaptly named the Settler's Clock; a loud cooee then roused my companion.”

The Zoological Society possessed this summer (1850) a Laughing Jackass in full feather and high spirits. We had the pleasure of seeing and hearing this strange creature giving vent now and then to its risible fit, as if it saw something in the appearance of some of the visitors to the Gardens of which it could not help expressing its contemptuous opinion. It is an ugly-plumaged fellow, with nothing to be proud of on its own part-a sort of gray bird with white interspersed, and the family feature, an enormous bill; but coming from the antipodes, and having such a remarkable name and habits, it seldom fails to attract the notice of those who have any suspicion what bird it really is.

CHAPTER VI.

THE GRALLATORES, OR WADERS, IN CAPTIVITY.

Their tameable disposition.-Fallacy of generalizing too much.-The White Stork and the Black.-Gigantic Indian Cranes.-Cruelty the companion of ignorance. Strange forms well contrived.-The Lapwing and the smaller Waders.-The Common Crane.-The Stanley Crane.-The Spoonbill.-The Common Heron.-Dr. Neill's Heron.-His proceedings, and attempts to breed.-Unfortunate end.

WE should hardly, on a first glance at the Waders, expect to find among them a great number of confiding, friendly, and easily tameable birds; and yet, if we select the individuals from each order to whom these epithets may be applied, we shall be able to make as long a list from the Waders as from any other, even the Rasores, in which the domestic fowls are included. The Grallatores alone would prove the little dependence there is to be placed upon Mr. Swainson's rasorial and other types, as any guide to the instincts of a little known creature, whatever index they may be to analogies of form. It does not follow that because the common fowl is eminently domestic, all other gallinaceous birds should be equally so. The pheasants furnish a sufficient refutation of this notion. And if the Rasores themselves are not universally docile and attachable in their tempers, how can any opinion be ventured, before actual experience, respecting their supposed representatives in other orders?

It is very amusing to those who have actually kept

living birds to find scientific naturalists (for whom we entertain all due respect) recommending us to patronize and protect certain species, as if they had no instinctive will of their own. We are to encourage this, and domesticate that, exactly as we choose to domesticate and encourage them: their consent to the arrangement is taken for granted, although we have plenty of hints that they do make a point of being consulted. We have condescendingly permitted many of the Waders to approach us in confidence; but the Bittern still prefers his swamps to any comforts that we can offer him. So that a general rule is as inapplicable to the Grallatores as to the gallinaceous birds, or, to the entire race of man and woman kind.

A great deal both of this mathematical distribution of the animate creation into" circles," and of precise seriesmaking in Natural History, is very absurd, if we look at it closely. "With the Penguins, Nature is about to pass from the birds to the fishes." How pass? Change the feathered fowl itself to a scaly swimmer? modify lungs into gills, flappers into fins? Beautiful imaginations!-perhaps unreasonable talk. There is certainly in each a common adaptation to the same element, and therefore some resemblance and analogy; but where can we show the passage, or act of transition? And the change of natural instincts is often as difficult to demonstrate as the metamorphosis of bodily form. The leopard cannot change his spots (even though he be a black leopard) nor the Ethiopian his skin: the sow returns to her wallowing in the mire. Even all Waders are not alike in disposition; nor can we make them so.

The White Stork appears to be one of the most

CHAP. VI.]

GIGANTIC CRANES.

315

domesticable, and therefore, to us, most interesting of its order; although, when we recollect, there are several of its near relations that are extremely familiar and submit readily to captivity, besides others that are less closely allied,-the Ibis, the Curlew, the Lapwing the Oyster-Catcher, Ruffs and Reeves, &c. Buffon, whose accounts of the habits of birds are much more valuable than his ideas of their mutual relations, remarks that "the Black and the White Stork are exactly of the same form, and have no external difference but that of colour. This distinction might be totally disregarded, were not their instincts and habits widely different. The Black Stork prefers desert tracts, perches on trees, haunts unfrequented marshes, and breeds in the heart of forests. The White Stork, on the contrary, settles beside our dwellings; inhabits towers, chimneys, and ruins: the friend of man, it shares his habitations, and even his domain; it fishes in our rivers, pursues its prey into our gardens, takes up its abode in the midst of cities, without being disturbed by the noise and bustle, and, ever respected and welcomed, it repays by its services the favours bestowed upon it; as it is more civilized, it is also more prolific, more numerous, more dispersed, than the Black Stork, which appears confined to particular countries, and resides always in the most sequestered spots."

Everybody will remember the gigantic Grallatores of India-the Marabous, &c., which are almost as much at home in human society as dogs and horses, fulfilling their office of living muck-carts of all sorts of offal. English residents have been said to exert upon them that habit of mischief which phrenologists affirm to be a peculiar manifestation of destructiveness, by

throwing down to them a marrow-bone, charged with gunpowder, and carrying inside a lighted match. The point of this fun comes when the explosion takes place within the stomach of the bird. We may be excused for blowing up a whale with a congreve rocket, as a less hazardous, and, perhaps, more merciful mode of securing our prey; but such barbarity to an inoffensive Stork is on a par with the cruelty of the blacksmith, who, for a wager, induced a duck voluntarily to swallow, in its hasty greediness, a piece of red-hot iron that he tossed to it among some lumps of raw meat. It is surprising how cruel thoughtless and ignorant people can be. A sergeant returned from India has told me with high glee, that one of his amusements there was to bore a smallish hole in a few cocoa-nuts, partly fill them with sugar, and throw them on the ground in the woods. The monkeys would contrive to insert their hands after the bait, and while unable to disentangle themselves, were whipped to death by the holidaymakers. And yet this man professed to be a sincerely religious person; only he forgot that monkeys could feel like himself. This digression may be mal-a-propos, and yet productive of good in the end.

Creatures of so strange an aspect as the Waders, with such oddly-formed members, are yet provided with these curiously-modified limbs for a special purpose. If any one feature had been made less exaggerated, less ridiculous to the vulgar eye than it is, the united working together of all to one end, viz. the sustenance of the bird, would to that degree have failed. When a Heron or a Stork alights upon a marsh, fishes and frogs may well call out, like little Red Riding Hood at the sight of the Wolf, "What are your great flapping wings