276 THE UNIVERSE. 



introduce its progeny? Levaillant quite desi^aired of being 

 able to penetrate this mystery, when chance furnished him 

 with an opportunity of doing so. Tlie celebrated traveller, 

 having killed a female golden cuckoo in Africa, found in 

 its gullet an unbroken egg which he recognized as that of 

 the bird itself, and his negro assured him that frequently, 

 when killing these cuckoos on the wing, he had seen the 

 eggs fall from their mouths. 



A modest savant, M. Florent Prevost, to whom we owe 

 such extensive and interesting observations, has discovered 

 that the same thing takes place with respect to our com- 

 mon cuckoo. He has noticed that the female lays her 

 egg on the ground, and then takes it in her beak, places it 

 in her gullet, and deposits it in the nest of the insectivor- 

 ous species of which she makes choice. 



Phny relates at length, that when the young cuckoo is 

 in the midst of the little family of the titmouse, the latter 

 seeing it so strong and handsome, sacrifices, from a senti- 

 ment of maternal vanity, all her other little ones to it, and 

 allows it to devour them before her eyes, falling herself a 

 prey to it in the end. 



Such is the fiction. Let us abandon it for the reality, 

 which is no less extraordinary, and Avliich was revealed to 

 us l)y a man of deathless fame — Jenner, the discoverer of 

 vaccination. 



It is not the mother but the young cuckoo that under- 

 takes the assassination. The great physician describes the 

 process in i\\Q PJtilosophical Transactions as follows: — "The 

 young cuckoo, a few hours after its birth, tries by the aid 

 of its rump and wings to glide lieneath the little bird whose 

 cradle it shares, and to get the latter upon its back, where 

 it keeps it by raising its wings. It then works itself back- 

 ward to the edge of the nest, raises itself up for an instant. 



