condition--a ball-room, in fact, a day after a _fête_. May a new companion speedily arrive and induce him to put his house once more in order! The satin bower-bird, like the magpie, is well-known by the natives to be a terrible thief; and they always search his abode for any object they may have lost. "I myself," says Mr. Gould, in his account of these birds, "found at the entrance of one of them a small neatly-worked stone tomahawk of an inch and a half in length, together with some slips of blue cotton rags, which the birds had, doubtless, picked up at a deserted encampment of the natives." Scarcely a less interesting bird is the brush-turkey. In appearance it is very like the common black turkey, but is not quite so large; the extraordinary manner in which its eggs are hatched constitutes its singularity. It makes no nest, in the usual acceptation of the term, but scratches decayed vegetable matter into a pyramid with its feet. It then carefully dibbles in its eggs at regular intervals, with the small end downward, and covers them over with the warm fermenting gatherings. The pair in the gardens, shortly after they were received from Australia, commenced making one of these hatching-mounds, which, by the time it was finished, contained upwards of four cart-loads of leaves and other vegetable matter. After the female had deposited sixteen eggs, each measuring not less than four inches in length--an enormous size, considering the bulk of the bird--the male began to keep watch over this natural Eccaleobion, and every now and then scratched away the rubbish to inspect them. After six weeks of burial, the eggs, in succession, and without any warning, gave up their chicks--not feeble, but full-fledged and strong: an intelligent keeper told us that he had seen one fly up out of the ground at least five feet high. At night the chicks scraped holes for themselves, and, lying down therein, were covered over by the old birds, and thus remained until morning. The extraordinary strength of the newly-hatched bird is accounted for by the size of the shell, which contains sufficient nutriment to nourish it until it is lusty. Unfortunately, all the young but one have perished through various accidents quite independently of temperature; and the next brood will probably be reared. As both the flesh and the eggs of these birds are delicious, the council is anxious to naturalize them among us. In fact, one of the objects of the gardens, under their enlightened management, is to make it what Bacon calls in his "Atlantis," "a tryal place for beasts and fishes." For centuries a system of extermination has been adopted towards many indigenous animals; the wolf and buzzard have quite disappeared, and the eagle is fast being swept away even from the highlands of Scotland--so rapidly, indeed, that Mr. Gordon Cumming is anxious, we hear, for the formation of a society for the protection of its eggs. Noxious animals have been replaced by the acclimatization of many of