110 PEACOCK. 



four feet. The bill is nearly two inches long, and brown ; hides 

 yellow ; on the crown is a kind of crest, composed of twenty-four 

 feathers, scarcely webbed, except at the ends, which are gilded 

 green, the shafts whitish ; the head, neck, and breast, are green 

 gold, glossed with blue ; over the eye a streak of white, and beneath 

 it another; the back and rump green gold, glossed with copper; 

 the feathers distinct, and lie over one another like shells ; the belly 

 and vent greenish black ; thighs yellowish ; scapulars and lesser 

 wing coverts reddish cream-colour, varied with black ; the middle 

 ones deep blue, with a gilded gloss; the greater coverts and bastard 

 wing rufous ; quills rufous, some of them variegated with rufous, 

 blackish and green ; the tail consists of eighteen grey-brown feathers, 

 eighteen inches long, marked on the sides with rufous grey ; above 

 the tail springs an inimitable set of long beautiful feathers or upper 

 tail coverts, adorned with a most brilliant and variegated eye at the 

 end of each, and of various colours, yellow gilded, a deep olive and 

 violet, with a black disk. These are very numerous, and of different 

 lengths : some equalling five feet, besides the quill, which is three 

 inches more : this grand train, or tail, as it is by some falsely called, 

 may be expanded perpendicularly upwards, being supported by the 

 feathers of the true tail ;* the legs are short, greyish brown, and those 

 of the male furnished with a strong spur, three quarters of an inch 

 in length. 



The female is smaller. Bill white ; irides lead-colour ; the crest 

 on the head the same ; on the sides of the head a greater portion of 



* One circumstance relating to this bird seems equally to have escaped Naturalists and 

 Philosophers — the power it seems to possess of communicating an electric motion to the 

 fibres of the long feathers of the the train when expanded ; for from no other cause can one 

 explain that tremulous movement, and horizontal position which the fibres acquire at certain 

 moments of the expansion, and which is accompanied with a noise like the emission of the 

 electric matter. Whatever command a bird may possess over the immediate tube of the 

 feather, the webs seem totally inanimate, and incapable of receiving any impulse whatever. 



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