THE TROPICAL REGIONS. 139 
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which hugs and folds it in its embrace, at the 
same time plunges into its own body these keen 
darts, and by its constriction, its own actual 
exertions, is poniarded. 
This brave and beautiful bird, last-born of 
the ancient worlds and a surviving witness to forgotten 
encounters, which is born, lives, and dies in the 
slime, in the primitive cloaca, has no stain nevertheless 
of his unclean cradle. I know not what moral instinct 
raises and supports him above it. His grand and 
formidable voice, which sways the desert, announces from 
afar the gravity and dignified heroism of the noble and 
haughty purifier. The kamichi (Palamedéu cornuta), 
as he is called, is rare; he forms a genus of himself, 
a species which is not divided. 
Despising the ignoble promiscuousness of the low | 
world in which he lives, he lives alone, with but one 
mate. Undoubtedly, in his career of war, his mate is ihe ; 
also a companion-in-arms. They love, they fight to- (, 
gether; they follow the same destiny. Theirs is that 
soldierly marriage of which Tacitus speaks: “Sic vivendwm, sic 
pereundum,” —‘“ To life, to death.” When this tender com- 
