252 CLASS AYES. 



his head and neck, forming a tuft and kind of ruff; he also 

 forms a wheel with his tail, swells his crop, trails his wings, 

 and accompanies this action with a dull humming sort of 

 noise, like a turkey ; he also summons the females with a very 

 singular clapping of the wings, loud enough to be heard at 

 the distance of half-a-mile in calm weather ; this exercise he 

 repeats every day, in spring and autumn, at stated hours. 

 When he begins, there is an interval of about two seconds 

 between each clapping : then, accelerating by degrees, the 

 strokes succeed each other with such rapidity that they pro- 

 duce a continuous noise like the sound of a drum. This, 

 which nature intended as a signal of love, often becomes one 

 of destruction, indicating to the fowler where he can find the 

 bird. 



These birds lay twice a year, apparently in spring and 

 autumn ; they make their nests with leaves, on the ground, 

 beside some dry extended trunk, or at the foot of a tree ; they 

 lay twelve or sixteen eggs, and the mother is much attached 

 to, and very courageous in defence of, the young. They are 

 very wild birds, impossible to be tamed ; if they are hatched 

 by common hens, they will escape, and fly into the woods, 

 almost as soon as they are excluded. Their flesh is white, 

 and very good eating. 



The majority of the species composing the order gallinae have 

 been allotted mild and temperate climates for their habitation. 

 Many of them live beneath the unclouded skies of equatorial 

 latitudes, where the sun and the soil combine their influ- 

 ence to cover an extensive tract of country with the richest 

 gifts of Nature in unlimited profusion. But this is not the 

 case with all. Some, though the smaller number, Nature, 

 like a step-dame, has confined to those inhospitable regions 

 of everlasting snow, on which she appears to have affixed 

 the seal of desolation. There, over immense and frozen 

 tracts, in the midst of a small number of animals, live the 



