14 LEAVES FROM 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 V 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. Accord- 

 ingly, 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 80th 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 assist- 

 ance 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 



