THE CLOWNS OF THE FOREST 89 



and feed her ? Would she stick to her position and die 

 of starvation ? Would she break open the barrier and 

 thus put an end to her self-imposed imprisonment ? Or 

 would she sit at the window of her castle and endeavour 

 to attract, by the " sweet melancholy " of her voice, some 

 knight-errant of a hornbill ? I have never had the 

 opportunity of performing such an experiment, as, al- 

 though hornbills are fairly numerous in Northern India, 

 they seem very secretive with regard to the position of 

 their nests. 



Hornbills are caricatures of birds, freaks of nature, 

 ludicrous clowns. There is not a single feature about 

 them which is not comical. Mr. Wallace thus describes 

 a hornbill nestling : " A most curious object, as large as 

 a pigeon, but without a particle of plumage on any part 

 of it. It was exceedingly plump and soft and with a 

 semi-transparent skin, so that it looked more like a bag 

 of jelly, with head and feet stuck on, than like a real 

 bird." If possible the adult is a yet stranger object. 

 The great hornbill (Dichoceros bicornis) is an enormous 

 creature. It is over four feet long. Its great beak 

 measures a foot in length and has a tremendous horny 

 excrescence, known as the casque, which causes the bird 

 to look as though it were wearing a cap. 



What the utility of this " helmet " is to the bird no 

 naturalist has yet been able to discover. Buffon thought 

 that great injustice was done to the birds by their having 

 to carry about this enormous deformity; he imagined 

 that it hindered the birds from getting their food with 

 ease ! As a matter of fact, Buffon's sympathy was mis- 

 placed, for the casque is hollow, and so is almost without 



