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CAEOLINA PAEROT. 
agent, to administer it by the first opportunity, and write me 
the result; but I have never yet heard from him. A respectable 
lady near the town of Natchez, and on whose word I can rely, 
assured me, that she herself had made the experiment, and that, 
whatever might be the cause, the cat had actually died either 
on that or the succeeding day. A French planter near Bayo 
Fourche pretended to account to me for this effect, by positively 
asserting, that the seeds of the coclde-burrs, on which the Pa- 
roquets so eagerly feed, were deleterious to cats; and thus their 
death was produced by eating the intestines of the bird. These 
matters might easily have been ascertained on the spot, which, 
however, a combination of trifling circumstances prevented me 
from doing. I several times carried a dose of the first descrip- 
tion in my pocket, till it became insufferable, without meeting 
with a suitable on whom, like other professional gen- 
tlemen, I might conveniently make a fair experiment. 
I was equally unsuccessful in my endeavours to discover the 
time of incubation or manner of building among these birds. All 
agreed that they breed in hollow trees; and several affirmed to 
me that they had seen their nests. Some said they carried in 
no materials; others that they did. Some made the eggs white; 
others speckled. One man assured me that he had cut down a 
large beech-tree, which was hollow, and in which he found the 
broken fragments of upwards of twenty Paroquets’ eggs, which 
were of a greenish yellow colour. The nests, though destroyed 
in their texture by the falling of the tree, appeared, he said, to 
be formed of small twigs glued to each other, and to the side 
of the tree, in the manner of the Chimney Swallow. He added, 
that if it were the proper season, he could point out to me the 
weed from which they procured the gluey matter. From all 
these contradictory accounts, nothing certain can be deduced, 
except that they build in companies, in hollow trees. That they 
commence incubation late in summer, or very early in spring, 
I think highly probable, from the numerous dissections I made 
in the months of March, April, May and June; and the great 
variety which I found in the colour of the plumage of the head 
