GREAT BUSTARD. 203 



ually substituted for rye ; and, at the price that grain fetched 

 in those days, the desire of not using more seed than was 

 absolutely necessary brought about the invention of the drill, 

 by means of which corn, thus sown, was capable of being 

 kept free from weeds with much greater facility. First, 

 parties of children were sent into the fields to perform this 

 operation, and then speedier, if not more thorough, execu- 

 tion was obtained by the use of the horse-hoe. Thus every 

 nest made by a Bustard in a wheatfield was sure to be dis- 

 covered — perhaps in time to avert instantaneous destruction 

 from the horses' feet or the hoe-blades, perhaps (and this 

 probably much the more often) only when the eggs had been 

 driven over and smashed and their contents were pouring out 

 on the ground. But even in the first case, instantaneous 

 destruction being avoided, the eggs were generally taken up 

 by the driver of the hoe (in defiance of the act of 25th 

 Henry VIII., which, though often enforced when smaller and 

 less valuable species were concerned, seems in the case of 

 the Bustard to have been regarded as a dead letter), and 

 carried by him to his master or mistress. If they were not 

 chilled by the time they reached the farmhouse they were 

 probably put under a sitting hen ; for all persons seemed to 

 imagine, till they tried, that the rearing of young Bustards 

 was as easy as the rearing of young Turkeys. If, however, 

 there was no hope of success in this direction, they appear 

 often to have been preserved as natural curiosities, to lie, 

 with grotesquely shaped flints and petrified Echini (the 

 * fairies' loaves ' of the district), on the parlour mantelpiece 

 or bookshelf till they met with the usual fate of such fragile 

 articles, though some four or five specimens are known to 

 have escaped all such risks and are actually still in existence. 

 But in either of these cases the result was the same. No 

 young birds grew up to fill the gaps made in the ranks of 

 the old ones according to the common course of nature, to 

 say nothing of those caused by occasional violent deaths ; 

 for although Mr. Hamond (following the example of his 

 father before him) and most of his neighbours allowed no 

 molestation of the Bustards on their estates, yet there is 



