74 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
REVIEWS. 
OSTRICHES.* 
V ERY considerable interest attaches to the Struthious order of Birds, both 
from a scientific and an economical point of view. Their remarkable 
characters, separating them as a group distinct from and morphologically 
equivalent to all the other existing birds ; their curious relations to other 
classes of vertebrate animals ; their singular geographical distribution, and 
the relations of the living to extinct forms give them great importance 
in the eyes of the zoologist, whilst the beauty of the plumes produced by 
at least one of the species, cannot but render it interesting to the fair 
wearers of such ornaments. The Roman ladies, as we learn from this 
book, did not adorn themselves with ostrich feathers, which were used, on 
the contrary, for the decoration of their helmets by a class of men gene- 
rally supposed to need no such extraneous aids for the captivation of 
female hearts ; but in our days, and in civilized countries, the ladies are 
generally allowed to have a monopoly of ostrich plumes. That they do their 
duty pretty thoroughly in the consumption of these articles of luxury is 
sufficiently clear from the tabular statements here given by M. de Mosenthal, 
from which it appears that the annual exportation of ostrich feathers from 
Africa, at present amounts in value to about 603,000/., which probably 
represents a weight of 120,000 lbs., each pound containing at least 120 
feathers. 
It may easily be conceived that such a consumption as this gives rise to 
very considerable slaughter of the birds, and it has long been felt that if 
the demand for ostrich-feathers should continue to increase as it has done 
for some years, there will be great difficulty in obtaining an adequate supply. 
As early as 1859 the Acclimatization Society of Paris, taking these facts into 
consideration, offered prizes for the successful domestication of the African 
ostrich in Algeria and Senegal, and in consequence of the attention thus 
attracted to the matter, several successful attempts have been made both in 
Africa and in Europe to bring up and breed the ostrich in captivity. But 
even at a much earlier period it appears to have been the custom among 
certain native African tribes to keep tame ostriches in enclosures, in order to 
obtain their feathers easily ; and at the Cape a hundred years ago, according 
* “ Ostriches and Ostrich Farming.” By Jules de Mosenthal and James 
Edmund Harting, F.L.S., F.Z.S. With Illustrations. London : Trubner 
& Co. 1876. 
