20 
honey-eating birds; the eucalypti or gum trees, by the tricholom 
or honey-eating parrots, and ptiloti , another group of the 
honey-eaters; the towering fig trees by the regent and satin 
birds ; the palms by the carpophayce, or fruit-eating pigeons ; and 
the grassy plains by the ground pigeons and grass paroquets. 
The circumstance of the boles of the trees in this country 
being destitute of a thick corrugated rind or bark, will doubtless 
account for the total absence of any member of the genus picus 
or woodpecker—a group of birds found in all parts of the world, 
with the exception of Australia and Polynesia. 
The birds represent many of the types found in Europe ; yet 
the Australian continent possesses genera exclusively its own, 
many of which are nocturnal—probably more in proportion 
than are to be found in any other country, and a remarkable 
feature connected with Australian ornithology is that of its com¬ 
prising several forms endowed with the power of sustaining and 
enjoying life without a supply of water, that element without 
which most creatures languish and die. 
Many of the Australian birds also display an extraordinary 
fecundity, breeding three or four times in a season, but laying 
fewer eggs in the early spring when insect life is less developed, 
and a greater number later in the season, when the supply of 
insect food has become more abundant. One bird, the black 
swan, is as prolific in England as in its native country, pro¬ 
ducing four broods in one year, and proves a very profitable bird 
to the owner. So well lias this Australian bird been acclima¬ 
tised in England, that during my recent visit to that country, 
Mr. Wolf, the celebrated animal artist, had visited Mr. Gurney’s 
residence in the country, at that gentleman’s request, to make a 
drawing of one rearing its brood in the winter in the midst of 
the snow, which drawing I had an opportunity of seeing, and it. 
displayed the old bird, with its sooty-plumaged young, nestled 
near the banks of an icy river, their dark plumage contrasting 
with the whiteness of the snow around them. 
In Australia, the parrots are a numerous family, forming four 
large groups. The large cockatoos, such as the black cockatoos, who 
procure their food of grubs, &c., from the Banksicz, casuarince , or euca¬ 
lypti; the cacatum , such as the rose and crimson crested cockatoos 
&c., feeding upon the bulbs of plants, more particularly the orchids* 
the honey-eating parrots (trichoghm), with their feathered tongue 
and no gizzard, such as the blue mountain and other parrots, 
subsisting only upon the nectar extracted from the blossoms of 
the gum trees and other flowering trees yielding honey; and the 
