ACEHOS. 79 



a sample of the plastering * material, which looks to me uncom- 

 monly like the bird's own ordure. 



" The entrance, after the plaster was picked away, measured 17 

 inches in length by 4| inches in breadth, and the hollow of the 

 tree 17 inches in diameter. The height of the hollow could not 

 be measured, but it must have been considerable. I am told that 

 two yoimg ones were taken out of the same hollow last year, and 

 that it has been robbed every season for many years past. The 

 natives also inform me that the Aceros never lays more than two 

 eggs, and occasionally one oulj^ as in the present instance, but that 

 two is the more usual number. The female is said not to leave 

 the nest from the time of her entrance till she comes out with her 

 young ready for flight, a period of about three months. 



" The male was seen to feed his mate, through the narrow opening, 

 with Bysoa-i/Ion fruit the evening before we robbed the nest. At 

 this season of the year Dysoxylon fruit seems to be their principal 

 food. The nest tree was laden with fruit, and was probably chosen, 

 on this accoimt, by the lazy husband, in order to reduce the labour 

 of feeding his wife and children to a minimum. The Lepchas and 

 Nepalese eat both the old and the young of the Aceros, and pro- 

 nounce them to be rather good eating." 



The egg is a broad oval, compressed somewhat towards one 

 end, so as to be slightly pyriform. The shell is strong and thick, 

 but coarse and entirely glossless, everywhere pitted with minute 

 pores. In colour it is a very dirty white, « ith a pale dirty yellow- 

 ish tinge, and ei'erywhere obscurely stippled, when closely exa- 

 mined, with minute purer white specks, owing to the dirt not 

 having got down into the bottoms of the pores. 



It measures 2-25 by 1'75. 



Another egg taken from the same nest on the 28th of April, 



* " The plaster appears under the microscope to be ahnost entirely composed 

 of vegetable tissvie, cells, fibres, oil-globules, &c., aud contains no evidence of the 

 presence of any clay or mineral matter of any kind. The vegetable tissue looks 

 as though it had been semi-digested, very many of the cells being wholly or 

 partially emptied of their contents, and free granules and globules of a bright 

 yellow oily-looking matter abounding. 



"The most abundant and characteristic forms of cells present are — 1st, 

 small, totally empty thick-walled cells, scattered or still holding together in 

 small patches; Znd, very large, rounded cells, full of the yellow oily matter so 

 abundant in the free state, and when full of a deep brown colour. Their 

 contents may be rather of a gummy than oily nature, perhaps, as boiling with 

 liqnor potasses reduces the material to a glutiuous mass of deep brown colour. 

 There are naturally also some fragments of feathers, spores of fungi, &c. present 

 in small numbers." 



This is our eminent pathologist Dr. D. D. Cuningham's report, and it makes 

 it quite clear, I think, that the plaster is nothing but the bird's own ordure, 

 with which she closes the aperture, leaving a hole large enough to admit of her 

 protruding the whole closed bill, and a slit below sufficient for the play of the 

 terminal two-thirds of the lower mandible when she opens her mouth to be 

 fed. The heap, at the foot of the tree, of rejected droppings daily cast out 

 by the bird, was of the same composition as the plaster, but contained leas of 

 the gummy globules, and a larger proportion of feathers, scraps of wood, &c. 



