ORDER PALMIPEDES. 653 



him, while he held a fish in his hand, that he knocked it 

 down with a blow of a cane ; and that some others were fly- 

 ing within a few feet of a cauldron where fish was cooking, 

 though some of the crew were around it. Nevertheless, these 

 daring birds will allow themselves to be knocked down, as 

 easily as the boobies, if surprised in a place where they have 

 not the power of extending their wings. 



The frigates place their nest on trees, in solitary places 

 near the sea. The eggs are one or two, white, tinted with 

 flesh-colour, and with small crimson spots. 



The birds of the division Sula, in English appropriately 

 termed Boobies, are in French called Foux, a term by no 

 means expressive of the moral qualities of these indolent 

 beings, which exhibit more of stupidity and imbecility than of 

 madness. However, if these birds shew the most incredible 

 apathy to the most imminent dangers, and if this kind of 

 self-abandonment has caused a doubt whether they even pos- 

 sessed the instinct of self-preservation, may there not be other 

 considerations, by which we may explain, to a certain extent, 

 how they suffer themselves to be killed by blows of sticks, 

 on coasts and islands where they seldom can have occasion to 

 behold man, or suspect him to be their most dangerous enemy, 

 and how they suffer themselves to be taken on the sail-yards 

 of vessels, which they encounter at sea .'' In the first case, 

 sufficient attention is not, perhaps, paid to the difficulty they 

 find in rising to flight, in consequence of the length of their 

 wings and the shortness of their legs ; and, in the second, to 

 the very natural ignorance of the danger which they incur, 

 on those vessels, the meeting with which is but transitory and 

 casual. As to the circumstance, which we alluded to in our 

 account of the frigate, relative to the facility with which they 

 render up their prey to the latter birds, for which they seem 

 to be intended as the purveyors, this is no more than what 

 happens to many other species, and even in the ftunily of the 

 raptores, as we have formerly had occasion to observe. More- 



