Miscellaneous. 383 
the large white cockatoo with the broad white crest is the most 
intelligent of the lot. I had one of them whom I wished to keep 
chained to a perch; but though a first-rate London locksmith tried 
everything his ingenuity could suggest, the cockatoo beat him 
utterly. Without breaking it, he contrived to open the ring or 
other contrivance for holding him, with his beak, though one or two 
of them must, one would have thought, have required great study 
to understand. 
The experiment of acclimatizing parrots has been tried on a some- 
what large scale. We have had African, Amazonian, and Carolina 
parrots ; Rosella parroquets, large Bengal parroquets, four species of 
cockatoos, and two of lories. The lories are magnificent birds, with 
their scarlet bodies and very long wings and tails of rich metallic 
green. Curiously enough, however, they are far less seen than any 
of the others, as they almost always sit buried in the thickest foliage, 
and have none of the sensibility and intellectual excitement of the 
cockatoos or parrots. In fact, however, all these birds vanish com- 
pletely out of sight during great part of the day; many of them, 
indeed, live in the woods at a distance from the house; but even 
those who have selected the trees in the garden for their residence 
would not easily be discovered. You would have supposed that at 
any rate the white cockatoos would be visible anywhere ; but 
the inclination of all animals is to slip out of the sight of man, 
and with the shadows of the trees upon them an unpractised eye 
would rarely discover them. In the morning and evening they come 
to feed upon hemp-seed, and bread and milk, which is hung in a 
basket from a tripod; and then, I can assure you, the groups of them 
are sometimes most beautiful. 
Lately we have had great losses, so many have flown away and 
been shot; but I will read a memorandum which I put down one 
day, a couple of years ago, of the scene I was watching, and which 
recurred morning after morning as I sat reading in my study at my 
house in Surrey. “The parrots’ breakfast having been put in the 
basket, a pair of white cockatoos, who had been anxiously watching 
the proceedings from the tree above, swooped down and set instantly 
to work. A Bengal parroquet, with long green wings, presently 
comes skimming up and flutters for a few minutes almost perpen- 
dicularly in the air, exactly in the attitude so often represented by 
Mr. Gould in his ‘ Humming-Birds,’ with the head and tail curved 
inwards, and the wings extended. Two or three rose-coloured 
cockatoos follow, and hang about on the tripod, but do not venture 
to take their places on the edge of the basket while their fiercer 
brethren are at work. But presently one of the huge white cock- 
atoos, with yellow crests, comes swinging heavily down over the 
lawn, putting all the lesser ones to flight in a moment; but they 
soon gather round again, and a lory, resplendent in red and green, 
darts through the air, and lights on the top of the tripod, his 
burnished hues contrasting well with the pure white of the cockatoo 
below; and the group is completed by a Cornish chough, whose 
glossy blue-black plumage and orange beak and legs are not the 
