THE MALEOS. 



199 



days (the natives assert) the same pair return, and another 

 egg is deposited. This statement seems to have been handed 

 down by tradition, having perhaps originated from the ob- 

 servation of some wounded or singularly marked bird. I am 

 inclined to think it is near the truth, because in the females I 

 killed before they had laid, the egg completely filled up the 

 lower cavity of the body, squeezing the intestines so that it 

 seemed impossible for anything to pass through them, while 

 the ovary contained eight or ten eggs about the size of small 

 peas, which must evidently have required somewhere about 

 the time named for their development. . . . The eggs 

 when quite fresh are delicious eating, as delicate as a fowl's 

 egg, but much richer, and the natives come for more than fifty 

 miles round to search for them. After the eggs are once de- 

 posited in the sand the parent birds pay no further attention 

 to them. The young birds on breaking the shell work their 

 way up through the sand and run off to the forest. 



" The appearance of the birds when walking on the beach is 

 very handsome. The glossy black and rosy-white of the plu- 

 mage, the helmeted head and the elevated tail, roofed like 

 that of the common hen, form a tout ensemble quite unique, 

 which their stately and somewhat sedate walk renders still more 

 remarkable. When approached they run pretty quickly, and 

 if suddenly disturbed, take flight to the lower branches of 

 some adjacent tree. There is hardly any difference between 

 the sexes. 



"When we consider the great distances the birds come, and 

 the trouble they take to place the eggs in a proper situation, it 

 does seem extraordinary that they should take no further care 

 about them. It is, however, quite certain that they neither do 

 nor can watch over them. The eggs deposited by a number 

 of hens in succession in the same hole must render it impos- 

 sible for each to distinguish its own ; and the food of the parent 

 birds can be obtained only by continual roaming, so that if the 

 numbers which come down to the beach alone in the breeding 



