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ALMOST HUMAN 
them at the Zoo by carefully ringing and marking the fine collection 
there. It is, of course, possible that they may take a little longer to 
reach full maturity in captivity, so completely out of their natural ele- 
ment. The Pacific gulls are very seldom seen in the bay, and only an 
occasional one is noticed around the coast of land-locked waters. It 
is the small silver gull that frequents our harbors and bay resorts. These 
pretty little birds follow a ship out to sea for perhaps five or six miles; 
then they give place to the Pacific gull, which accompanies the vessel 
perhaps for upwards of forty miles. There they seem to disappear, and 
the lordly albatross comes on the scene. Mother Carey’s chickens are 
about the size of the silver gull, but are of a greyish tinge. Sailors dis- 
like these birds, considering them omens of evil. But the lovely albatross 
is welcomed and watched, and most people spend hours on shipboard 
in watching their marvellous flight. Even if a boat is going at twenty 
knots an hour the albatross finds time to circle round and round the 
ship, dip back a mile or two, play at hide and seek with the mountainous 
waves by tumbling over the crests as he lightly skims the surface with 
one wing, sinking into the troughs and grandly rising on the other side, 
all being done without even the tremor of a wing or the quiver of a 
feather, like some exquisite aeroplane. Their tireless ease and effortless 
speed gives a sense of so great reserve strength that no sympathy for 
exhausted battlers with the elements ever dims the enjoyment of the 
spectacle. It is strange that these great birds have no power to rise 
unassisted from land or from the deck of a ship. They can be captured 
easily, and kept in captivity as long as they are out of their native 
elements — air and water. When they are nesting they fall easy victims 
to depredators, because they must run out to sea and swim until they 
find themselves on the side of a wave, from which they vault into the 
“blue dome of air.” Several times there have been albatrosses in the 
gardens, but they are not meant for captivity. They are at first very 
savage, but hopelessness tames them, and they die in two or three months 
— die from tameness, just as do other beings, birds, or men, that live for 
one purpose only, and that a non-material one. 
THE LOCUST PLAGUE. 
The ibises are natives of Australia. The black and white and the 
straw necked varieties are both found here, and live in myriads in the 
swampy marshes of north-west Victoria and the south-west borders of 
New South Wales. They are full cousins to the famous sacred ibises 
of Egypt. Mr. Le Souef has in his office a mummified ibis dating from 
