450 MEQAPODIIDJE. 



with a stick or with the end of their daos, and when they find a 

 spot where the sticlc sinks in easily they scoop out the sand with 

 their hands, generally, though pot 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 gene- 

 rally 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 3| to 4 feet deep, and how 

 the young manage to extricate themselves from the superincumbent 

 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 seventy of these eggs, sixty-two of which 

 were preserved ; these yary much both as regards colour 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-coloured, the 

 depth of shade increasing as the eggs approached the hatching- 

 point ; but it does not follow from this that all dark-coloured eggs 

 will be found to be not fresh, for very often very dark-coloured 

 eggs are laid. There are three types of eggs — a dull clayey-pink, 

 an earthy-yellow, and an earthy-brown — of several shades. 



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

 from the surface the sand feels sliglitly damp and cold, but as the 

 depth increases the sand gets damper but at the same time increases 

 in warmth." 



I saw a considerable number of these mounds, chiefly at Galatea 

 Bay, and there I examined some of them very minutely. These 

 were situated just inside the dense jungle which commences at 

 spring-tide high-water mark. It appeared to me that the birds first 

 collected a heap of leaves, cocoanuts, and other vegetable matter, 

 and then scraped together sand which they threw over the heap, so 

 as not only to fiU up all interstices, but to cover everything over 

 with about a foot of pure sand, — 1 say sand, but this term is calcu- 

 lated to mislead, because it does not contain much silex, but 

 consists mainly of finely triturated coral and shells. After a certain 

 period, whether yearly or not I cannot of course say, the birds 

 scrape away the covering sand-layer from about the upper three- 

 fourths of the mound, cover the whole of it over again with vege- 

 table matter, and then cover the whole in again with the sand. In 

 the large mound, an old one, into which I carefully cut a narrow 

 section from centre to margin, this arrangement was very percep- 

 tible ; in it I thought I could trace, by the more or less wedo-e- 



