THE CLOWNS OF THE FOREST 89 
and feed her? Would she stick to her position and die 
of starvation? Would she break open the barrier and 
thus put an end to her self-imposed imprisonment? Or 
would she sit at the window of her castle and endeavour 
to attract, by the * sweet melancholy” of her voice, some 
knight-errant of a hornbill? I have never had the 
opportunity of performing such an experiment, as, al- 
though hornbills are fairly numerous in Northern India, 
they seem very secretive with regard to the position of 
their nests. 
Hornbills are caricatures of birds, freaks of nature, 
ludicrous clowns. There is not a single feature about 
them which is not comical. Mr. Wallace thus describes 
a hornbill nestling: “A most curious object, as large as 
a pigeon, but without a particle of plumage on any part 
of it, It was exceedingly plump and soft and with a 
semi-transparent skin, so that it looked more like a bag 
of jelly, with head and feet stuck on, than like a real 
bird.” If possible the adult is a yet stranger object. 
The great hornbill (Dichoceros bicornis) is an enormous 
creature. It is over four feet long. Its great beak 
measures a foot in length and has a tremendous horny 
excrescence, known as the casque, which causes the bird 
to look as though it were wearing a cap. 
What the utility of this “helmet” is to the bird no 
naturalist has yet been able to discover. Buffon thought 
that great injustice was done to the birds by their having 
to carry about this enormous deformity; he imagined 
that it hindered the birds from getting their food with 
ease! Asa matter of fact, Buffon’s sympathy was mis- 
placed, for the casque is hollow, and so is almost without 
