Occasional Notes. 
Cultivation of Artificially Coloured Feathers. — The 
curious habit, practised by several uncivilized peoples, 
chiefly, it is believed, American, of -altering by artificial 
means the colour of the feathers of living birds, or rather 
of causing the growth of feathers of an unnatural but 
desired colour, is deserving of more attention than it 
has yet received. The first step toward the requisite 
examination must be by collecting the recorded notices 
of the practice. Very few such notices are known to 
me ; and, living far from all libraries, I am unable to 
search for more. I wish, therefore, here to call atten- 
tion to the subjecl, and to invite correspondents to send 
me any notices of the practice with which they may meet. 
My own few contributions, to form a nucleus for the 
collection, are as follows : — 
i. Humboldt in his "Personal Narrative"* notes a 
curious instance met with by him on the Orinoco. He 
writes : — 
" In going to the embarcadero, we caught on the trunk of a heveaf 
a new tree-frog, remarkable for its beautiful colours ; it had a yellow- 
belly, the back and head of a fine velvety purple, and a very narrow 
stripe of white from the point of the nose to the hinder extremities ; 
this frog was two inches long and allied to the Rana tinctoria, the 
blood of which, it is asserted, introduced into the skin of a parrot, in 
places where the feathers have been plucked out, occasions the 
growth of frizzled feathers of a yellow or red colour." 
Two points in this instance require notice. In the 
first place, the alleged frizzling of the feathers, as an 
* Vol. 2. Chap. xxi. p 313, (Bohn's Edition). 
■(■ The genus Hevea consists of certain caoutchouc-producing trees, 
the best known of which are H. Brasiliensis and //. Spruceana. 
YY 
