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 /out 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 
hie 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 
