HAMLYN'S MENAGERIE MAGAZINE. 
31 
THE PHEASANTS OF THE WORLD. 
For Englishmen the word pheasant usually 
brings to mind a single bird that gives a touch of 
tropical brilliance to our oftentimes sombre fields 
and woodlands. Yet the family is a large one. 
Nearly a hundred species are distributed in various 
countries, including Ceylon, India, China, Japan, 
Borneo, and Java. One peculiarity of the race is 
that it is not alone beautiful in plumage, but is 
also excellent on the table, and for this latter rea- 
son it is hunted down in every land with a per- 
sistency that in the case of the rarer species es- 
pecially, points to a nearing extinction. 
The New York Zoological Society are, there- 
fore, to be congratulated on their determination 
to prepare a complete monograph of this most in- 
teresting group before manv of its members have 
passed away beyond recall. In order to achieve 
the difficult task of studying the fixing races of 
pheasants in their natural environment, ranging 
from the slopes of Himalayan snow peaks sixteen 
thousand feet above the sea, to the tropical sea- 
shores of Java, Mr. William Beebe, in connection 
with the society, undertook a seventeen months' 
journey in some twenty countries, during which 
he visited the chief habitats, where he gleaned a 
store of material both literary (concerning the life 
histories of the birds) and pictorial, in the form of 
photographs and sketches. This material is to 
be embodied in four royal quarto volumes — limited 
to 600 numbered sets, at the price of £12 10s. per 
volume — of which the first volume has already ap- 
peared. 
It is a somewhat striking fact, and one indi- 
cating the growing devotion to nature, that, not- 
withstanding war exigencies and restrictions, a 
work costing ^50 and embodying the study of a 
single group, can be published successfully. 
-@- 
THE CANADA PORCUPINE. 
Mr. Charles Macnamara, Arnprior, Ontario, 
has kindly sent to us a copy of a paper which re- 
cently appeared in the "Ottawa Naturalist," in 
which he describes many of the peculiarities and 
more intimate habits of this somewhat bizarre ani- 
mal. The abrading and compacting which all lan- 
guage undergoes in the course of time, he tells us, 
have changed the "porcus spinatus," or spiny pig 
of the Latins, into the "porcupine" of modern 
English. This spiny pig, which is not really a pig 
at all, has one marked characteristic that sets it 
apart from all other mammals. It has a mode of 
defence peculiarly its own. Although it possesses 
large, chisel-like teeth, it never, in the writer's 
experience, uses them to bite with, even in times 
of direst stress. Mr. Macnamara, indeed, des- 
cribes it as the original passive resister. Its habit 
when attacked is to turn its back on the aggres- 
sor, and to permit its formidable quills to bear 
the brunt of the assault. 
"The quills," Mr. Macnamara writes, 
"are clearly only modified hairs, and various 
types may be found on the same animal, rang- 
ing from plain stiff bristles through slender 
smooth-pointed spines up' to stout needle- 
sharp barbed quills. The quills are loosely 
held in the soft fat skin by a conical root, with 
a rounded shoulder, and they appear to come 
out at the slightest touch. Indeed, before 
trying some experiments, I could not under- 
stand why they did not fall out in the ordinary 
stress of daily life; and I formulated a theory 
that, when the quills were in their normal 
depressed position, they were held in the skin 
more firmly than when they were erected to 
stand off an enemy. Herbert Spencer's 
friends said that the philosopher's sole idea 
of' a tragedy was a beautiful theory killed by 
a devilish little fact. In my case, the little 
fact was that the quills were not held more 
firmly in one position than in another. Ad- 
mittedly, the porcupine I experimented with 
was a dead one, but I cannot see that there 
would be any difference in the result in life. 
The truth is that it requires a pull of a quar- 
ter of a pound or so to free the quills from 
their sockets, and no ordinary friction to 
which they are subjected is sufficient to re- 
move them. But when once the point of the 
quill is caught in the flesh of an enemy, the 
barbs hold it so firmly that it readily pulls out 
of the porcupine's skin. The barbing, which 
is so minute that its structure can only be 
seen under considerable magnification, is 
formed simply of tin} over-lapping scales, 
like shingles on a roof. To the touch it is 
only a slight roughness at the point of the 
quill, but the hold it takes is astonishing. 
Once the quill makes an entrance, it never 
draws back, and every movement of the vic- 
tim only serves to drive the dart deeper. Its 
policy, like that of the high-handed Strafford, 
is 'thorough.' A hapless dog, with its nose, 
jaws, and tongue stuck full of these inexora- 
ble little arrows, is a most painful sight, and 
strong forceps are needed to pull them out." 
That these quills have a peculiarly penetrat- 
ing quality we once learned by personal experience. 
A hunter killed a porcupine on the shores of the 
Muskoka lakes when we were fishing there, and 
we extracted a bundle of quills for the purpose of 
examination. Later, wearied by the heat, we fell 
asleep in the verandah of the wooden "hotel," the 
only house of call in these backwoods for very 
many miles. When we awoke, we found that some 
fellow-guests — two young ladies — had been divert- 
ing themselves by working an elaborate design 
around our cap with the quills of the porcupine. 
