PEA FOWL. 



gqnat merely. Accordingly they escape from the Egg with 

 their quill-feathers very highly developed. In three days 

 they will fly up and perch upon any thing three feet high ; in 

 a fortnight they will roost on trees or the tops of sheds, and 

 at a month or six weeks you would see them on the ridge of a 

 barn, if there were any intermediate low stables or other 

 building that would help them to mount from one to the 

 other. It must be a clever snake that would get at the cun- 

 ning little rogues when they were once perched on the feathery 

 branch of a bamboo. . . . 



There are two varieties of the common Pea Fowl, namely, 

 the Pied and the White. The first has irregular patches of 

 white about it, like the Pied Guinea Fowl, the remainder of the 

 plumage resembling the original sort. . The White have the 

 ocellated spots on the tail faintly visible in certain lights. 

 These last are tender, and are much prized by those who 

 prefer rarity to real beauty. They are occasionally produced 

 by birds of the common kind, in cases where no intercourse 

 with other White birds can have taken place. In one in- 

 stance, in the same brood, whose parents were both of the 

 usual colours, there were two of the common sort, and one 

 White Cock and one White Hen. The old notion respecting 

 them, which has given rise to serious theoretical errors and to 

 many false inferences, is, that they originated in the north, in 

 Norway or Sweden ; the climate in which Ptarmigan, Snow 

 Buntings, Alpine Hares, &c., annually put on a white livery; 

 having made them permanently white. From some minds this 

 false idea has yet to be eradicated ; it was the foundation of 

 several of Buffon's boldest speculations respecting the influ- 

 ence of climate on the forms of animals, leading him to 

 hazard the assertion, among others, that the Silver Pheasant 

 is only the common Pheasant changed to a lighter hue by mi- 

 gration to a more northerly region, while he forgot that the 

 Silver and the Common Pheasant are both natives of the same 



