CH. VI.] BARENESS AT BASE OF ROOK’S BILL. 217 
amongst naturalists, as to whether the bareness 
of the Rook’s bill is, as Bewick says, “an original 
peculiarity,” or whether the feathers which at first 
grow on its base are worn off by contact with the 
soil into which it is constantly thrust. It seems to 
me that those who hold the former theory have 
the best of the argument, but as the only way of 
proving which is in the right would be to confine 
rooks from their infancy in a place where they 
could not possibly have access to mould, or other 
substance by which the bill-feathers could be 
rubbed off, it will probably be some time before 
the question is solved. Yarrell mentions that 
“two or three other birds (not British) are now 
known to exhibit this peculiarity of losing the 
bill-feathers,’ but we might go nearer home for a 
case, in which something analogous occurs, that 
of babies, on whose foreheads at their birth is 
visible a distinct down, which shortly afterwards 
disappears. Nor is this peculiarity noticeable only 
in babies: every one must have observed how much 
more woolly the heads of young asses are than 
those of older ones, and Sir J. Emerson Tennent in 
his interesting Work on Ceylon (Vol. 1. p. 385, 
note) similarly remarks that, “the young elephants, 
when captured, are frequently covered with a 
