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press, the doors of which had been left open. Macky climbed the doors, ransacked the press, pulled out the sheets, tablecloths, &c., and threw them down to the beaver, who, having made a most luxurious bed, laid himself down thereon; and when the room was entered, Macky and Binny were found fast asleep, the former with his head and shoulders pillowed upon Binny's comfortable neck. When Binny died, I determined to have no more sorrowing for pets, and sent Macky to the Zoological Society's Garden in the Regent's Park, where they got him a wife, with whom he lived long and happily.

The two beavers which were in that garden when I gave the late lamented Mr. Bennett permission to print the account of my domesticated beaver, were sent to the society from Canada by Lord Dalhousie. They were partially deprived of sight before their arrival in this country: but one of them had the use of one eye; and the other, although totally blind, dived most perseveringly for clay, and applied it to stop up every cranny in their common habitation that could admit 'the winter's flaw.' They lived some time together, apparently happy

and contented.

January, 1850.

8

G

CHAPTER II.

REAT as have been the advantages of menageries, in bringing immediately under the eyes of every observer animals which would otherwise be hardly known, except from books, or from their remains preserved in museums, they have, it must be confessed, been fatal to romance. The exaggerated proportions which travellers have assigned to birds and beasts-ay, and men -partly from seeing the objects at a distance, and partly from the highly-coloured and, in many instances, imperfectly-understood accounts of the natives, shrink when the living creature is before the spectator. In such cases truth-like the best pictures of the Italian masters, which are not satisfactory at first, especially to those who have admired the extravagances, however poetical, of a Fuseli-looks poorly; and it is only after consideration that the mind becomes reconciled to the light, before which errors and false pretensions vanish.

How many who have read of the condor till he has been almost magnified into the roc of Arabian story, have been disappointed at the first sight of those birds which have been kept so long at the garden of the Zoological Society of London! I can hardly call to mind one who has so seen them in my presence, whose expectations had not gone far beyond what he then saw. To say nothing of more general romantic statements, eighteen feet have been given as the actual measurement across the expanded wings of the great vulture of the Andes. old male belonging to the society, a very fine specimen, measures eleven feet from tip to tip when his wings are outstretched; his length does not exceed four feet nine inches. Both he and his partner, notwithstanding their

The

confinement a confinement which must be peculiarly irksome and unnatural to a bird, the greater portion of whose free life is spent on the wing, sailing in the higher regions of the atmosphere, far above the throne of clouds of the

Giant of the western star,

appear to enjoy good health, proofs of which have been given in their attempts to continue the species notwithstanding their unfavourable situation.

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In a state of nature the eggs of the condor are said to rest on the rock, without stick or straw, and unprotected by any border. There, at an elevation of from ten to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, on such ledges and plateaux as 'The Condor's Look-out,' 'The Condor's Nest,' The Condor's Roost,' the nestling first breathes the highly-rarefied air. A year elapses, it is asserted, before the downy young one is sufficiently plumed to leave the mother. About the end of the second year the colour is a yellowish-brown, and, up to this time, the gollila or ruff is not visible, whence probably arises the notion that there are two species of condors, one black (the colour of the adult), and one brown. Flying to a more lofty pitch than any other bird, and reduced in the sight of the upward gazer, amid the grand and gigantic scenery, to the size of hawks, they wheel round, keeping their telescopic eyes on the valleys, watching for the fall of some failing horse or COW. Then down come the condors to the feast. In their daintiness they generally begin with the tongue and the eyes, but the rage of a hunger sharpened by days of watching on the wing, in the eager air of a very high altitude, is not easily appeased. The bird, rioting in the midst of the plentiful table which death has spread for it in the wilderness, after tearing up the hide with its trenchant beak, carves out and swallows gobbet after gobbet, till it is so gorged as to be unable to raise itself

on the wing. This the Indians well know, and when they have a mind for a battue they set forth a dead horse or cow and quietly watch the progress of the repast, which is sure to be attended by the condors, some of them being almost always on their watch far aloft. When they are well gorged, and looking on each other with gluttonous gravity, the Indians make their appearance with the deadly lasso. Then comes a scene of excitement, gladdening the heart of the sportsman only a degree less than the stimulating bull-fight. The lassos are thrown with more or less success. Some of the birds are noosed, others contrive to scramble away: but when a condor is caught there is a fight, and a stout one, before it is killed; and indeed the stories told of its tenacity of life would be incredible, were they not attested by trustworthy witnesses.

Humboldt shall be called to make out a strong case. He was present when the Indians tried to overcome the vitality of one which they had taken alive. Having strangled it with a lasso, they hanged it on a tree, pulling it forcibly by the feet for several minutes, in a manner that would have done credit to Mr. Calcraft and his assistants. The execution being apparently over, the lasso was removed: the bird got up, and walked about as if nothing had happened. A pistol was then fired at it, the man who fired standing within less than four paces. Three balls hit the living mark, wounding it in the neck, chest, and abdomen: the bird kept its legs. A fourth ball broke its thigh. Then the condor fell, but it did not die of its wounds till half an hour had elapsed. This bird was preserved by M. Bonpland. Such direct and unimpeachable evidence should make us pause before we hastily discredit the accounts of older writers. Ulloa was thought to have used a traveller's privilege when he asserted, that in the colder localities of Peru the condor is so closely protected by its feathery armour,

that eight or ten balls might be heard to strike without penetrating, or, at least, bringing down the bird.

Not that we give credence to the stories of the condors carrying off children-indeed the evidence is against such a statement; and still less do we believe the accounts of their attacking men and women. At all events, Sir Francis Head has proved that a Cornish miner is a match for one of these great vultures. Humboldt allows that two of them would be dangerous foes when opposed to one man; but he frequently came within ten or twelve feet of the rock on which three or four of them were perched, and they never offered to molest him. Indeed the Alpine lämmergeyer,* the Phenè of Aristotle and Ælian, is little inferior, if not equal, to the condor in size, and like the condor haunts great mountain-chains. As the condor is the great vulture of the New World, this vulture-eagle holds its throne on the lofty precipices of the old continent. On the Swiss and German Alps, from Piedmont to Dalmatia, in the Pyrenees, in the mountains of Ghilan and Siberia, of Egypt and Abyssinia, this, the largest of the European birds of prey, is on the watch to scourge the country. With more of the eagle than the vulture in its composition, and with claws more fit for rapine than the nails of the condor, it generally seeks for a living prey, and, soaring with its mate above the hills and valleys, pounces upon the lambs and other quadrupeds. The stories of its having carried off children in its crooked talons wear a much greater air of probability than such tales when applied to the condor, with its comparatively impotent foot. The strength of the lämmergeyer and its conformation are quite equal to such murderous acts; for a full-grown one is four feet from beak to tail, and nine or ten in alar extent. But the lämmergeyer contents itself with a dead

* Gypäetus barbatus, Storr.

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