414 * CONDOR. 
occasioned it to be said that some condors had a white 
back. ; 
For several months during the early part of their life, the 
young are covered with very soft whitish down, curled, and 
resembling that of young owls: this down is so loose as to 
make the bird appear a large shapeless mass. Even at two 
years old the condor is by no means black, but of an obscure 
fulvous brown, and both sexes are then destitute of the white 
collar. 
The following description and admeasurements are from a 
pair of young living birds, said to be nine months old, caught 
on the Peruvian Andes. One of these (which are precisely 
alike) was captured by an Indian, who discovering two in the 
nest, ran up at great speed, fearing to be overtaken by the old 
ones, and succeeded in securing it by putting it in his pocket, 
not larger than a full-grown chicken. I have carefully com- 
pared this with, and found perfectly similar to it, a bill and a 
quill-feather brought from the Columbia river by Lewis and 
Clark, and preserved in the Philadelphia Museum. These 
remains prove the existence of the condor within the United 
States, and sufficiently authorise its introduction into this 
work. 
Length, three feet nine inches; breadth, nine feet. Bill to 
the corner of the mouth, two inches six-eighths ; to the cere, 
one inch and a half; to the down, three and a quarter inches. 
Bill curved and hooked, with several flexures ; upper mandible 
passing over the lower, which is rounded and scalloped: 
nostrils pervious, rounded-elliptical, cut in the cere. Bill 
outside, cere, and all the surrounding naked parts, black ; 
ears without any covering ; the skin rugose: inside of the 
bill yellowish white, margined with black, palate furnished 
with a fleshy skin, having the appearance of a row of teeth in 
the middle, then of a hard ridge looking like a file, and two 
marginal rows: tongue broadly concave, and serrated on the 
turned-up edges with sharp-pointed cutting serratures: an 
elevation of the skin indicating the frontal caruncle; the place 

