AMEKICAN INSTITUTE. 305 



female, and slie deposits another egg in the same nest. Next day 

 the third female does the like. Then the first female couples and 

 puts in another egg, then the second, then the third; always in 

 this order. So that each lays from fourteen to twenty eggs. It 

 is said that each female puts her eggs together in the nest. The 

 male sits on them every night. When the nest is full of eggs, and 

 there is no room for the rest, they arrange the surplus ones in the 

 ditch, in symmetrical order. They never put one egg on another. 

 If tlie ostrich happens to break one of the inside eggs, she re- 

 places it with one from the ditch outside. As soon as a young 

 one leaves the shell, the old one makes a hole in a surplus egg for 

 it to feed on. They cover the eggs with body and wings. The 

 eggs will keep from one to two months sound. The female lays 

 between the first and second year of her life. All accounts agree 

 that they sit on the eggs all day and all night until they are 

 hatched. 



The length of the time of incubation is left uncertain; the 

 «ggs and the sand about them are very hot. Some accounts say 

 that when ostriches are dom^ticated, they never lay; others say 

 they do. Observations made at the ksours of Oulad, Sidi, Chikh, 

 where a great number of ostriches, of both sexes, have been 

 raised in a domestic condition. Si Djellout Ban Hanza asserts 

 that he saw, at Marakac, the capital of Morocco, in a park belong- 

 ing to the palace of Mouley Abder Rahman, numerous ostriches 

 which coupled and set and raised young ones just as they do 

 when wild. All reports agree as to the facility with whicli the 

 ostrich is fed. Here follows a list of plants, and besides, like 

 turkeys, they devour grasshoppers. They also like rats, snails, 

 snakes, lizards and jerboas, and they fatten on the grasshoppers. 

 In a domestic state they love barley, eating about five pounds 

 weight a day; as many dates, and twenty-five pounds weight of 

 grass. They give him the fresh bones of their meat, breaking 

 them into pieces and mix with the barley. But everything is 

 good for them, grain, white corn, sorgho, beans, ail fruits and 

 vegetables, shrubs, bushes, leaves of trees, oil cake; they devour 

 the olives; they swallow small stones every day, no doubt to 

 triturate their food. They drink very little in winter, and as 

 [Am. Inst.] 20 



