S99 
Natural History. -^Zoology 
as that of a slave. Till the time of Nero, however, they knew 
no other species, but those from India, when those who mini- 
stered to the pleasures of that extravagant and luxurious Em- 
peror, found them in an island far up the River Nile, called 
Gaganda. The Portuguese, who first doubled the Cape of 
Good Hope, found the whole coasts of Africa and the Islands 
of the Indian Ocean peopled v^^ith various tribes of parrots, to- 
tally unknown in Europe, and in such vast numbers that it was 
with difficulty they could be prevented from devouring the rice 
and maize. These, however, were far inferior to the numbers 
and variety that presented themselves to the first adventurers in 
the New World. Some of the islands there were called the 
Parrot Isles, from the vast quantity of these birds that flocked 
upon them. They constituted the first articles of commerce 
between the inhabitants of the Old and New Continents. In 
those regions every forest swarmed with them, and the rook is 
not better known in Europe than was the parrot in the East 
and West Indies. So great is their variety, that nothing seems 
more remarkable than that only one species should have been 
known to the ancients at a period when they boasted of being 
masters of the whole world. Of more than two hundred species 
now known, scarcely one naturally breeds in the countries that 
acknowledged the Roman power, a striking proof how ill found- 
ed the pretensions of that people were to universal dominion. 
The Green Paroquet, with a red neck, is the first of this genus 
that was brought into Europe, and it is now only known by the 
descriptions given* of it by the ancients. Birds of this kind are 
said to be subject to diseases unknown to the rest of the feather- 
ed tribe. Many of them die of the epilepsy and the gout. 
They have been separated into two great divisions, those of the 
Old and those of the New W^orld, — the former into cockatoos, 
parrots, lories, and paroquets ; the latter into acas or maccaws, 
amazons, criks, popinjays and paroquets. The lories inhabit 
the Moluccas, New Guinea, and other Asiatic Islands. They 
do not occur in America. Owing to their powerless flight, the 
birds of this tribe inhabiting one island of an archipelago, are 
often of a different species from those of a neighbouring one. 
The Touis, or short-tailed parrakeets, are the smallest of all 
the American parrots. They only equal the size of a sparro'W, 
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