PUBFLjE-CAPPEI) loby. 
49 
able to break down bis work, and scatter bis conclusions to tbe 
winds. 
All birds, and tbe Purple-cap is one of these, that feed more on 
soft than on bard food, require daily attention to keep tbeir cages or 
other dwelling-places sweet and clean. Thus a large bird-room inhabited 
by, say one hundred, seed-eating birds, may, quite safely, be left for 
twelve months without being cleaned out, and no ill effects either to 
the birds, or to the human inhabitants of the house need be appre- 
hended; but if even half a dozen soft-billed birds are included with 
them in the apartment, the case will be very different, and great care 
must be exercised, or very objectionable results will speedily follow: 
such a room, containing even the limited number of six soft-billed, 
or soft-food-eating birds will require to be thoroughly cleaned out and 
everything in it renewed at least four times a year, so that on the 
whole it is much better not to keep hard and soft-billed birds together 
in the same aviary. 
Similarly the cage of a seed-eating bird may be cleaned out once 
a week only, but that of a soft-food-eating bird, such as a Purple- 
capped Lory, must be attended to every day, or the health of the 
bird will suffer, and the room in which the cage is place be rendered 
almost uninhabitable by reason of the effluvium arising therefi’om. 
Although the Purple-cap does not, as a natural consequence of the 
diet upon which it subsists, eat, or rather swallow, as much grit and 
sand as a seed-eating bird, it cannot be preserved in health without 
some small gravel for use in its gizzard, as the muscular stomach of 
birds is popularly termed; therefore the owner will do well to place a 
plentiful supply of coarse river, or well-washed sea, sand at the bottom 
of his pet Lory’s cage, which he must make up his mind to clean, 
or have cleaned, out every day, not even excepting Sunday, and this, 
being a work of necessity, need cause no scruple to the most consci- 
entious of bird-keepers, or aviarists, to use the latest word coined to 
express a fancier of feathered pets. 
As a further incentive to exertion in this respect, a clean cage means 
a clean, healthy, comfortable, happy-looking bird, while a dirty cage 
necessitates a miserable, bedraggled, moping creature, that spends half 
its time with its head under its wing, endeavouring by such means to 
shut out the evil odours arising from the floor of its domicile, from 
its sensitive olfactory nerves. 
Again, a dirty cage is always more or less infested with vermin, 
and a bird tormented by these wretched parasites soon becomes diseased, 
often plucks itself bare of feathers in its desperate attempts to free 
itself from its tiny myriad tormentors, and, from continual disturbed 
I. E 
