614 " ULTIMUS ROMANORUM." 



engagement was long and desperate. The man was compelled to put 

 forth all his strength. At length, exhausted, torn, and bleeding, he 

 left his enemy on the field of battle, and carried off for a trophy a 

 few feathers, which he showed to his comrades, affirming that he had 

 never fought a harder fight. The other miners went in search of 

 the corpse of this terrible bird. They found him standing erect, and 

 flapping his wings in order to fly away. They only killed him by 

 crushing in his head with a hatchet. 



The condor enjoys the privilege of an exceptional longevity. The 

 Indians of the Andean plains assert that he lives nearly a hundred 

 years. He builds no regular nest ; the female is satisfied with a 

 hollow in the rocky cliff of sufficient size to shelter her while hatch- 

 ing her eggs. Both parents busy themselves very attentively in 

 bringing up their young, disgorging in their beaks the food which 

 they have themselves taken. The young birds grow slowly ; it is 

 not until they are six weeks old that they begin to flutter round 

 their parents. Their training, however, lasts but a few months ; 

 after which they separate of their own accord from the male and 

 female birds, and seek their own nourishment. 



The condor has the loftiest flight of all the winged race. He has 

 been seen towering in the " blue serene," on a level with the snow- 

 crowned summit of Illimani, 23,000 feet above the sea, in a region 

 where man cannot endure the excessive rarefaction of the air. When, 

 in the fulness of time, civilization shall have conquered to itself the 

 South American continent, the condor, flying for refuge to these 

 brain-wildering heights among the icy peaks of the Cordillera, shall 

 be, perhaps, in that quarter of the globe, the latest denizen of the 

 Desert the last representative of THE SAVAGE WORLD. 



