134 GANG-GANG COCKATOO. 



To which we replied, " Cause and effect, my dear sir; stop the 

 unnatural diet, and perhaps the feather-picking habit will be abandoned"; 

 but we hare not since heard from our correspondent; though once a 

 Parrot, or a Cockatoo, acquires such a depraved taste as that of flesh 

 eating, there is no telling what enormities it will not perpetrate, and 

 a cure is all but impossible. We cannot get it to sign a pledge, 

 and it is deaf to reason; nay, let us charm never so cunningly, it will 

 disregard all our remonstrances; and, whenever it is left alone for a 

 moment will recommence to disfigure itself. 



"The rarity and beauty of the bird", writes Dr. Russ of the Ganga, 

 "naturally cause the price to be high"; and there seems no prospect 

 of the figure being reduced, seeing that the bird is an inhabitant of 

 the densest and most inaccessible districts, into which no one but an 

 aborigine could penetrate; and these, in Tasmania at all events, as our 

 colleague pathetically laments, are extinct. 



Poor people ! when Cook, in an ill-fated hour, discovered their beautiful 

 and climatically highly favoured island home, they were very numerous; 

 but in considerably less than one hundred years the last survivor of 

 the race died a prisoner to the usurping whites in Hobart. We are 

 a great nation, but we have not been kind to the aborigines anywhere 

 where we have set our colonising feet; though perhaps in no possession 

 of ours have we been so altogether wanting as in Yan Dienian's Land, 

 where the natives were hunted down, shot, poisoned and massacred 

 wholesale, like wild beasts, by the settlers and their bond slaves, as 

 the deportes practically were; until, as we have said, the last survivor 

 of the race died a few years since a virtual prisoner, though made 

 much of as a curiosity when it was too late. 



A case of the survival of the fittest, some one may say. Well, we 

 cannot argue the point, nor is this the place to do so; but we hope 

 that it may be a long long time before the Gang-Gang, and the other 

 beautiful members of the Parrot family that are now to be found in 

 tolerable abundance in Tasmania, where the Swift Lorikeet frequents 

 the streets of Hobart, follow their human compatriots to that bourne 

 from whence is no return. 



To resume: there is considerable difference between the male and 

 female Helmeted Cockatoo; for while the head, face, and crest of the 

 former are bright scarlet, the same parts in the latter are a dusky 

 brownish grey. The young are said, on the authority of Gould, to 

 resemble their mother; and although we have not chanced to meet 

 with one of its nest feathers, there can be no reasonable doubt upon 

 the matter; seeing that in almost every case where the female differs 

 in plumage from her mate, all the young resemble her until after their 



