122 PSITTACUS CAROLINENSIS. 
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 he 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 cockle 
burs on which the paroquets 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 pre- 
vented me from doing. I several times carried a dose 
of the first description in my pocket till it became 
insufferable, without meeting with a suitable patient , 
on whom, like other professional gentlemen, I might 
conveniently make a fair experiment. 
I was equally unsuccessful in my endeavours to dis- 
cover 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 mate- 
rials ; others that they did. Some made the eggs white ; 
others speckled. One man assured me that he cut down 
a large beech tree, which was hollow, and in which 
he found the broken fragments of upwards of twenty 
paroquet 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 
