THE ISLANDS OF THE BAY OF BENGAL. 279 



made the mounds (so I was iuformed) are small, but are gra- 

 dually enlarged by the birds. The natives never dig a mound, 

 away, but they probe it with a stick, or with the end of their 

 ddos. and when they find a spot where the stick sinks in easily, 

 they scoop out the sand with their hands, generally, though not 

 always, filling in the holes again after they have abstracted the 

 eggs. The Nicobarese and the Malay and Burmese traders take 

 numbers of these eggs which they generally cook by placing 

 them in hot ashes, but they also sometimes boil them quite hard, 

 and they do not seem to be very particular whether the egg is 

 fresh or contains a chicken in a more or less advanced stage 

 of development. The Nicobarese, at any rate, appear to relish 

 a boiled or roasted chicken out of the egg, quite as much as 

 they do a fresh egg. 



" The eggs are usually buried from tlrree and a half to four feet 

 deep, and how the young manage to extricate themselves from 

 the superiucumbent mass of soil and rubbish seems a mystery. 

 I could not obtain any information from natives on this point, 

 but most probably they are assisted by their parents ; if not 

 entirely freed by them, for these latter, so the natives affirm, 

 are always to be found in the vicinity of the mounds where 

 their eggs are deposited. , 



" We obtained about 70 of these eggs, sixty-two of which 

 were preserved ; these vary much both as regards color and 

 size, and they undoubtedly darken very materially by being 

 buried in the sand, for I have found, that eggs containing 

 chickens in a more or less advanced stage of development were 

 dark colored, the depth of shade increasing as the eggs ap- 

 proached the hatching point; but it does not follow from this 

 that all dark colored eggs will be found to be not fresh, for very 

 often very dark colored eggs are laid. There are three types of 

 eggs — a dull clayey pink, an earthy yellow, and an earthy 

 bi'own of several shades. 



" The surface soil of the mounds only is dry ; at about a 

 foot from the surface, the sand feels slightly damp and cold, but 

 as the depth increases the sand gets damper, but at the same 

 time increases in warmth/' 



I cannot myself agree with Davison about the coloring of the 

 eggs. On the contrary the brightest pink e^g we got was one 

 which the bird had not even time to bury before she was sur- 

 prized. Moreover the shells tell their own tale, almost all the 

 small holes in pink eggs, most of the medium sized ones, in the 

 bufiy stone colored ones, and all the largest holes in the brown- 

 ish ones. 



