8 
lidus, as familiar among the pouliry of a house yard 
as the pigeons, The washings of the plates gave him 
generally a sufficiency of fish and flesh-food, but if 
he got only soaked bread, and broken yam and rice, 
he was quite reeonciled to his feeding. I have my- 
self kept the booby, sula fusca, for months, and as 
we have six different species, very unsatisfactorily 
made out by naturalists,—though the distinctions 
noticed by Brisson, are precisely correct, it would be 
worth some pains to get them together in a sea side 
menagerie. I have seen the palamadea,—the chau- 
na-chavaria,—that the Indians of Carthagena rear 
among their geese and fowls, as a guard to the poul- 
try-yard against vultures, living on grain and aqua- 
tic herbs, and housing among our hens.and chickens. 
It is as large as a Turkey. I have seen the nyeti- 
corax, asubmissive retainer. We have two species, 
—one the Americanus, distinguishable only from the 
Gardeni of Europe in size, and both breed in the 
mangrove lagoons about Port Royal. I have seena 
flock of dendrocygna arborea and autumnalis kept; 
and the sultana, the gallinula martinicensis,—tame 
as the porphyrio of Sicily, to which it is allied both 
in splendour of colouring and character. In Marti> 
nique they take the young of the purple gallinule 
from the marshy savannas, and find that they tame 
easily, fed on rice, peas, and bread; and Buffon’ re- 
lates that the Sicilian porpbyrios, which the Marquis 
de Nesle kept in his volery, showed such a ready dis- 
position to domestication in the strictest sense of the 
word that, in the Spring of 1778, a pair constructed. 
