Fear in Birds. 87 
T suppose the Talegallus—the best-known brush- 
turkey—must be looked on as an exception to all 
other birds with regard to the pomt I am con- 
sidering ; for this abnormal form buries its eggs in 
the huge mound made by the male, and troubles 
herself no more about them. When the young is 
fully developed it simply kicks the coffin to pieces 
in which its mother interred it, and, burrowing its 
way up to the sunshine, enters on the pleasures and 
pains of an independent existence from earliest 
infancy—that is, if a species born into the world in 
full possession of all the wisdom of the ancients, can 
be said ever to know infancy. At all events, from 
Mr. Bartlett’s observations on the young hatched 
in the Zoological Gardens, it appears that they took 
no notice of the old birds, but lived quite independ- 
ently from the moment they came out of the ground, 
even flying up into a tree and roosting separately 
at night. Iam not sure, however, that these ob- 
servations are quite conclusive; for it is certain 
that captivity plays strange pranks with the instincts 
of some species, and it is just possible that in a 
state of nature the old birds exercise at first some 
slight parental supervision, and, like all other 
species, have a peculiar cry to warn the young of the 
dangers to be avoided. If this is not so, then the 
young Talegallus must fly or hide with instinctive 
fear from every living thing that approaches it. I, 
at any rate, find it hard to believe that it has a 
knowledge, independent of experience, of the 
different habits of man and kangaroo, and dis- 
criminates at first sight between animals that are 
dangerous to it and those that are not. This 
