the popularization of science in read a suggestive paper te zo and f 4 e of ed NS. cu im e to phize his ly Bib primary d the first e that could i heart that e lacked "the nature." From Longman's Magazine. INDIAN BIRDS. ds about a few more Indian y a few, for it would be folly u to write exhaustively of all the I Bengal. When a gun is fired or. Chilka lake or on the Chullun beel, or any other great inland piece of water, ne flocks of birds rise in such myriads that the sky is almost darkened by them. x- I have sometimes wondered if the birds the are not more numerous than the human uyptic beings of the country, but that is a stathat the tistical matter far out of my province to would be decide. I regret that it is not in my power g the world to write more scientifically about some of Then the birds with which I was tolerably familays quite iar. My scientific knowledge was very of your defective. I remember on one occasion rrors. ing fact that Dr. Herdman's recent biological researches on the Adamsia palliata - that curious anemone which strikes up a partnership with the hermit crab- have confirmed Mr. Gosse's original observations on these strange fellow-lodgers in the shell-house of the defunct whelk-observations made forty years earlier. The widespread interest, indeed excitement, caused by the setting up of the splendid aquarium in the Zoological Gardens, is within the recollection of many of the less youthful among us. It afforded an excellent field for observing the habits of those curious and often beautiful creatures who inhabit the caves of ocean, and who would otherwise have remained unknown to us. As we are all aware, the aquarium became the fashion of the day. It was quite the exception for a drawing room to be without its ornamental tank of marine creatures. Leech gave some delightful sketches in Punch on the fancy of the hour. Amongst them we may recall a "terrific accident," which was nothing less than the bursting of " Mrs. Twaddle's Aqua-Vivarium;" the water has deluged the carpet, and the lively crabs and livelier eels are scuttling about everywhere; with petticoats tucked up out of the wet, the old lady is vainly trying to catch the eel with the tongs! In another skit, Leech gives a very comical view of ladies young and old at low water-stooping about in search of curios, and taking no thought of their ankles. Kingsley's review in the North British, of Gosse's extremely popular and oftenquoted work"The Aquarium was memorable for the fact of the review being subsequently enlarged into that charming little volume familiar to us as " Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore." Bowerbank had told Gosse that he would find "Tenby the prince of places for a naturalist," and thither the latter went in the summer of 1854. From this place he wrote some pleasant letters to Kingsley, descriptive of his "anemonizing" exploits, and of his delight at finding the beautiful caves of St. Margaret's Isl and, with their "rugged walls and floor studded with the full-blown blossoms of those lovely animal flowers." The volume called "Tenby" which forms the record of this visit exhibits, perhaps, some little evidence of spent enthusiasm. The condential simplicity of the style invoked from the Saturday Review a friendly laugh on "Mr. Gosse's air of taking us upon his knee, like a grandpapa." The naturalist, whose seaside rambles had hitherto been shared by his wife, was ell's words The fire-side sweetnesses lift, the heavenward The hourly mercies of a woman's soul. But, seriously speaking, the sea dredging was a most exciting occupation, for it became a matter of business with Gosse in 1853, when the Zoological Gardens expected a daily "bag" from their purveyor of living curiosities. With this object in view, he stayed a long while at Weymouth, always sailing with an old fisherman, Depressed in spirits, physically unnamed Jonas Fowler, who delighted to hinged, and perhaps somewhat mentally the end of his life to talk of how "me and exhausted by the untiring labors of the Mr. Gosse went out dredging in the bay." last few years, there now returned upon He had re-christened his boat, calling it Gosse the morbid religious despondency the Turritella, "just to astonish the fish- that formed the background of his singuermen, you know, sir." Mr. Gosse de-lar nature. In these times of depression scribes how Fowler became quite learned in the crackjaw nomenclature. He would say: nothing relieved him so much as to take up the cudgels of controversy, and belabor the devil and his followers, the nonconverted, without mercy. He held the Now, sir, if you do want a gastrochana, Ilaw and the prophets, like blood-hounds can just put down your dredge upon a lot o' 'em. I'm in hopes we shall have a good cribella or two off this bank, if we don't get choked up with them 'ere ophiocomes. About this time, his friend Charles Kingsley had been urging Gosse to try Clovelly, and the latter replies: in a leash, to let loose on unbelievers. In his creed elated his soul into a state of these preaching days, the intolerance of infallibility, that sustained him through the rest of his life. He had joined the sect of Plymouth Brethren - but he was his own pope, no "dear brother" ventur black letter find; to you, I dare say, black letters are as charming as sea-slugs to me." On one occasion his son, still a mere lad, had evidently asked for funds wherewith to make some addition to his wardrobe, in view of a visit to a person of some importance. His father writes: You remind me of canny King James's appeal, when he asked the Earl of Mar to lend him a pair of silk stockings, in which to receive the French Ambassador-"for ye wad na that your king should appear as a scrub afore the stranger." ing as much as to stand on the steps of his throne. Many of these characteristics -a really curious study in psychology are gathered from his unpublished letters; and, moreover, the following incident, laughable enough in its way, does not appear in Philip Gosse's biography. His horror of the festival of Christmas some. times took a grotesque form. Like the Puritans of the seventeenth century, he fought with turkeys and with geese. "Christmas plum-pudding," however, was the most hateful of all these Yule-tide idols. The first winter that his little son The biography, which is full of interand he spent alone at St. Marychurch esting side-lights on the thought and scisaw, so I have been told, an amusing in-ence of the time, mentions the fact that, stance of Mr. Gosse's unflinching firm in 1857, Gosse was assisting Darwin in ness. No difference, as a matter of course, his researches on the distribution of seawas made in the repast of which father animalcules — a matter involving "enorand son partook on Christmas day, but the mous conclusions," as the evolutionist reservants were less austere. They made marked. The letters of Darwin to his in secret a plum-pudding for themselves, fellow-worker are replete with interest; and what was worse, they presently lured they show his manner of dealing with the the little boy out of the parior to eat a apparently insignificant phenomena of slice. Scarcely was the delicacy down life, which under his classification revealed his gullet, than conscience began to work. the potentiality of nature's hidden laws. He had eaten of the accursed thing,' Gosse, on the other hand, though so accuand with tears in his eyes he went to con- rate an observer that it was well-nigh imfess what he had done. Mr. Gosse sprang possible for any differential minutiæ to to his feet; leading the child by the hand, escape him, was not given to philosophize he rushed like a whirlwind into the kitchen, in the highest meaning of the term - his found the guilty remainder of the plum- theory of the universe being strictly Bibpudding on the table, snatched it away lical, in all literal acceptation. into the back garden, and, in the presence of his awe-stricken child, solemnly hewed it in pieces with a bill-hook, and scattered the crumbs over the dustbin. It is curious that his own sense of humor had not preserved him from perpetrating this piece of folly, for humor he had; and I do not think his biographer has quite done him justice in this respect. In the letters before referred to -letters written to the members of his family, there are repeated gleams and flashes of a very human sense of humor. For illustration, the phrases and allusions are difficult to separate from their context; but the native gold shines here and there in the stony matrix of his pompous intoler ance. It is curious to note the mixture, in the self-same letter, of sound worldly wisdom, of literary acumen, together with an expression of the strongest belief in the approaching realization of apocalyptic prophecy-even to the conviction that the saints, few enough in number, would be caught up to the Lord, leaving the world to a period of unexampled horrors. Then reverting to mundane things, he says quite cheerfully, "Let me wish you joy of your The Welsh Triades give three primary requisites of genius. Gosse had the first and the second; he had "an eye that could see nature," and he had "a heart that could feel nature - but he lacked "the boldness that dares follow nature." From Longman's Magazine. MORE INDIAN BIRDS. A FEW words about a few more Indian birds! Only a few, for it would be folly to pretend to write exhaustively of all the birds of Bengal. When a gun is fired or the Chilka lake or on the Chullun beel, or on any other great inland piece of water, the flocks of birds rise in such myriads that the sky is almost darkened by them. I have sometimes wondered if the birds are not more numerous than the human beings of the country, but that is a statistical matter far out of my province to decide. I regret that it is not in my power to write more scientifically about some of the birds with which I was tolerably familiar. My scientific knowledge was very defective. I remember on one occasion listening to an elaborate discussion concerning the bird that my scientific friends called a dendrocygnus. It was some comfort to find that it was only a familiar waterfowl known to me as the whistling teal. Perhaps this appellation for it is wrong, but it is a kind of duck that whistles and perches upon trees. I don't know why science gave it the half-Greek, half-Latin name of a tree-swan. But, however this may be, I have a lively recollection of shooting a number of these birds that we called whistling teal, one afternoon when we arrived at our tents well tired after a long and hot day's beat on the elephants, without killing anything of any sort, as will sometimes happen. Owing to the great heat of the weather, all that had remained of the deer and birds previously killed had gone bad, and the cook had nothing but bully-beef (as the soldiers call it) for his pièce de résistance for dinner. Fortunately when the elephants went off to drink and bathe at a large tank about a quarter of a mile from our tents they disturbed a number of whistling teal, which imprudently came whistling and flying round the tents, so that we took up our guns and soon provided ourselves with some fresh food. A salmi or a curry of whistling teal is by no means a bad thing for a hungry hunter. If these teal or ducks had not whistled we might not have known what they were or that they had come within our reach. Probably some persons among the crowds who visit the Zoological Gardens in the Regent's Park may have taken notice of the large and ugly cranes called Indian adjutants. I don't remember why our predecessors in India gave them the name of adjutant. It is a classica! Indian bird known to the old Sanskrit poets as the har-gila, or bone-swallower. A fullgrown adjutant stands about four feet high. It has a large, yellow, horny, sharppointed beak nearly a foot long. The head or skull is bare save as to a few stunted hairs or rudiments of feathers. Its small grey eyes look dull and stupid; the long neck is thin and almost naked. In front of the neck there hangs a bag or pouch of elastic skin, which the bird inflates at its pleasure. The plumage of the body is of a greyish blue color on the back, but it is white in front. The legs are long and bony, like those of other cranes, but the knee-joints are large, and the great splay feet and claws are very powerful. The general appearance of an adjutant in repose has been compared to that of a bald old gentleman standing with his back to the fire, with his hands under his coat-tails. An officer of my acquaintance once went to a fancy ball dressed as an adjutant bird, but it does not easily lend itself to the notion of a good fancy costume. About the end of May the weatherwise in Calcutta begin to look towards the dome of Government House to see if any adju tants have arrived. The adjutant is the forerunner of the rains in Bengal, and when the residents of Calcutta have been severely fried and baked by the dry heat in March, April, and May, they begin to look forward for that change in the weather, locally called the rains, in which their bodies will only be stewed or parboiled at a rather lower temperature. But until thirteen adjutants have been seen sitting in a row along the battlements of Government House, it is no use to try to make believe that the rains have really begun. There may have been a few preliminary showers or thunderstorms, but until thirteen adjutants can be found "to make a house on the roof of the viceroy's Calcutta residence, Jupiter Pluvius, or the chairman of the rainy season, does not condescend to take his seat. If any one wants to know why thirteen is the constitutional number I cannot tell. Some people say they represent the members of the viceroy's Council who are up at Simla, but their number is not always the same. I can only recognize tradition and the fact. And the thirteen birds must be sitting in line on the roof. It does not count if a few weak-minded birds are perched on the heads of the big plaster lions that surmount the arched gateways on the east and west sides of the Government House gardens. In former days a huge figure of Britannia was to be seen on the top of the dome of Government House, and perhaps the adjutants are loyal to the memory of Britannia. But it is a remarkable fact that when the adjutants come to Calcutta at the beginning of the rains they almost all make for the roof of Government House, from which position they subsequently distribute themselves to different parts of Calcutta according to their fancy. The adjutant is migratory, and many of them are supposed to come from central Asia; but there was once a colony of them that had its breeding-place at Comercolly, about one hundred and fifty miles north of Calcutta, whence the old East India Company used to bring consignments of Comercolly feathers for the adornment of ladies' dresses and bonnets. The feathers were taken from the birds' nests, or from the birds on their nests, and were only procurable in the breeding season. A few adjutants remain in Calcutta all the year round, but these are usually birds that were sick or maimed when the rest of their brethren returned to central Asia, and were therefore unable to go with them. There are some few degraded adjutants so wedded to the unspeakable filth of the outfall of the Calcutta drainage works that they never go away; but any right-minded and healthy adjutants that have a desire for wedded life and for the cares of a young family, depart from Calcutta at the end of September to the country where they themselves were born. long strides and outstretched wings, soon overtook the rat, tossed him in the air and swallowed him. Occasionally a very smart rat would double under the leading adjutant's legs, but the rat had little chance of escape, for if it evaded one pursuer, it only ran into the mouth of another. The adjutant may be called a sacred bird, but as this epithet might be misunderstood as if it applied to Hindoo mythology, I must explain that he is consecrated to municipal duty, and is sanctified by the protection of the municipal law. Any one who kills an adjutant in Calcutta is punishable by a fine of a gold mohur or thirty. two shillings. I never found this law in the statute-book, any more than I ever saw that almost fabulous coin the gold mohur in its original gold. But there is no English magistrate in Calcutta who would hesitate to impose a fine of a gold mohur on any one convicted of killing an adjutant. One of my contemporaries in the old college of Fort William was so fined, although he had killed the adjutant in his father's garden, and his father was one of the judges of the chief court of justice. There used to be a tradition that the British soldiers in the barracks of Fort William once blew up an adjutant by inducing it to swallow a marrow-bone in which there was a charge of gunpowder and a slow-burning fuse, but I hardly believe it. A similar but perfectly true story was, however, within my own cognizance, and it occurred at the Chinsurah barracks, when the old 29th Regiment was quartered there. The soldiers, after their dinner, got two marrow-bones and tied them to gether with a stout string about twenty yards long. The marrow-bones were then thrown out separately to two expectant adjutants. One bird seized and swallowed one bone, and the other bird caught and got outside (as the Yankees say) of the other bone. The two birds then flew up towards their usual perches on the barrackroof, but as they flew apart the string tightened, and as they pulled against one another, and neither would part with his bone, they finally came flopping to the ground to the great edification of the soldiers. When the two birds were on the ground there was a severe tug of war between them, until at last the string broke. and each of them flew off triumphantly to digest his bone, and the yards of string attached to it at its leisure. During the months that the adjutant lives in Calcutta it is interesting to watch him. He appoints himself chief scavenger of a certain house or houses, and has first choice of the contents of the dust-bins, which each householder is required to deposit outside his gate at daybreak till the conservancy carts remove them. The adjutant's operations may be more easily imagined than described, whilst the pariah dogs of the quarter and a bevy of attendant crows look on till his lordship is satisfied with the bonnes bouches that he picks out with his sharp beak, tosses into the air, and swallows, until his stomach becomes so full that he is obliged to take a little walk round to let matters settle themselves. I regret that I have been recently deprived of a story about the voracity of adjutants, that had been believed by me for many years. I had been told that Mr. R. had seen an adjutant walk quietly along a wall to a sleeping cat, which it pierced with its beak, tossed up in the air, and caught in its mouth. But I recently met Mr. R., and he tells me that he did not see the adjutant swallow the cat, but that his friend Mr. S. said that he had seen an adjutant pick up and swallow a live kitten. Now that is a very different thing, and is more likely to be true than the story about the cat. For a kitten may be about the same size as a rat, and I have often seen the adjutants catch and swallow live rats. At the stables of the house of a friend of mine, the native servants used almost every night to catch live rats in traps. When the morning came the men used to carry the traps out on the open maidaun, attended by three or four adjutants, who very well knew what treat was in store for them. With our binoculars we could see from the house the poor rats let loose and Some few adjutants do not come into dash off at their best pace towards the towns or cities, and occasionally when out stables. But a grim adjutant, with his | snipe-shooting I have come across a pair |