138 LEAVES EROM THE 



The nest of the ostricli appears to be nothing more than 

 a pit of sand, some three feet in diameter, the sand being 

 thrown up so as to form a raised edge round it. 



From this modified and somewhat loose degree of in- 

 cubation we pass to the exception to the general rule to 

 which we have above alluded. 



The visitors to the garden of the Zoological Society of 

 London, in the Kegent's Park, may see a plain-looking, 

 sombre bird, with a considerable share of tail, of a size 

 between a common fowl and a curassow,* walking and 

 picking about as if it were looking for something it ought 

 to find but cannot. It is, at present, in the great aviary 

 on the south side, on the right after entering the gate 

 from the road. This is the brush turkey] of the colonists 

 of New Holland, the weelah of the aborigines of the 

 Namoi. If any one should inform an uninitiated visitor 

 that the bird before him never sits upon its eggs, but 

 plants them in a hotbed, as a man might plant cucumber 

 and melon seeds, he would be taken for the most noto- 

 rious fabulist since the days of Bidpai. If he should en- 

 lighten the neophyte farther, and instruct him that the 

 birds collect the materials for this hotbed themselves, and 

 bide their time till the fermentation has reached the 



longer duration than that of a hen. "VVlien, therefore, the com- 

 mon hen's eggs were hatched, the hen partridge must have hur- 

 ried to the conclusion that the rest of the eggs (her own) were bad, 

 and that it was of no use to waste further time upon them ; where- 

 upon she went away with her foster-chickens, leaving her own eggs 

 to their fate. 



Here we have an instance of misled instinct. Nor is the facility 

 with which the chickens appear to have accommodated themselves 

 to the wild habits of their foster-parents, so far as their powers 

 would permit, uninstructive. They were in a fair way of returning 

 to savage life ; and, if a similar accident had happened in an unin- 

 habited or uncultivated country, who shall say what results might 

 have sprung from the connexion ? 



* Crax. t Taler/alla Latliami (Gould). 



