^°'lc^8^''] Mattinglev, T heymomeler-Bird or Mallee-Fowl. ^^ 



of the ancient inland lakes, or rather some vast inland sea, 

 which, as the continent of Australia became uplifted, drained 

 away in many directions in the shape of streams, which spread 

 out and deposited their sandy scour in all directions as they 

 rushed to lower levels. Thus it is that we find the sand 

 distributed throughout the Mallee at the present day. The 

 ancestors of the Lipoa of those ancient times gradually 

 metamorphosed and adapted themselves to the altered conditions 

 of their environment, and so we find them inhabiting sandy 

 tracts of country, or places where the soil is loose and friable. 

 This is a necessary concomitant in their breeding habits, as will 

 be shown later on. We also find a counterpart of this peculiarity 

 in the nesting habits of another genera of the Megapodiidce. 

 Unlike other birds, which incubate their eggs by sitting and 

 brooding on them, the Lipoa builds no nest in which to brood, 

 but instead forms a nesting mound in which the eggs are 

 hatched out by heat, which the birds, with truly wonderful 

 forethought, create artificially, assisted as well by the genial 

 warmth of the sun, which the birds, in the choice of a site on 

 which to build their mound, arrange to fall upon it. 



Mound, and Rise of Mound-building Habit. — How 

 did the Lipoa become possessed of the intelligence which 

 enables it to build such vast natural incubators with which to 

 hatch out its eggs ? Whence comes this bird's extraordinary 

 knowledge of the chemistry of fermentation, and that heat 

 artificially engendered thereby vvill incubate their eggs } How 

 did these birds ascertain that by building a huge oven, as it were, 

 of earth and sand, and by placing leaves, twigs, and other 

 vegetable rubbish in its centre, and by covering it in when the 

 material had been damped by rain and dew, a perfect hot-bed 

 would be made whereby their eggs would be hatched out by the 

 resultant heat ? Why does the Lipoa regulate the heat of the 

 mound ? How did it know that it was necessary to do so ? 

 What part of the bird's organism acts as a thermometer, 

 indicating and conveying to it the intelligence that the tempera- 

 ture of the interior of the mound is high enough to successfully 

 incubate their eggs ? When we remember that the heat supplied 

 by nearly all the other species of birds for the incubation of 

 their eggs is adventitious, depending principally on the warmth 

 radiated by the parent's bod}^ the temperature of which they do 

 not regulate to any great extent, then the wonderful and compli- 

 cated methods of forming a breeding-pit adopted by the Lipoa 

 to hatch out its eggs arrests one's attention, and its mound- 

 building habit is prominently brought before us as one of the 

 greatest wonders to be found in the life-history of birds. All 

 these complicated questions I hope to examine in this paper. 

 When we search for the reason that induced the Lipoa to make 

 a nesting mound to incubate its eggs, we must look to the past 



