THE TROPICAL REGIONS. 



139 



;i 



which hugs and folds it in its embrace, at the 

 same time plunges into its own body these keen 

 darts, and by its constriction, its own actual 

 exertions, is poniarded. 



This brave and beautiful bird, last-born of 

 the ancient worlds and a surviving witness to forgotten 

 encounters, which is born, lives, and dies in the 

 slime, in the primitive cloaca, has no stain nevertheless 

 of his unclean cradle. I know not what moral instinct 

 raises and supports him above it. His grand and 

 formidable voice, which sways the desert, announces from 

 afar the gravity and dignified heroism of the noble and 

 haughty purifier. The kamichi (Palamedda cornuta), 

 as he is called, is rare ; he forms a genus of himself, 

 a species which is not divided. 



Despising the ignoble promiscuousness of the low 

 world in which he lives, he lives alone, with but one 

 mate. Undoubtedly, in his career of war, his mate is 

 also a companion-in-arms. They love, they fight to- 

 gether ; they follow the same destiny. Theirs is that 

 soldierly marriage of which Tacitus speaks : " Sic vivendum, sic 

 pereundum," "To life, to death." When this tender com- 



* , * , t * ' 



m 



' 



