Toucans in their manners are gentle and confident, exhibiting no alarm at strangers, and are as playful as magpies or jackdaws; travellers assure us that they may be taught tricks and feats like parrots; and although they cannot imitate the human voice, they show considerable intelligence. One of the Toucanets is named from Mr. Gould, the plates in whose _monograph_, from their size, beauty, and accuracy, have all the air of portraits. ECCENTRICITIES OF PENGUINS. This group of amphibious birds, though powerless in the wing as an organ of flight, are assisted by it as a species of fin in their rapid divings and evolutions under water, and even as a kind of anterior of extremity when progressing on the land. Their lot has been wisely cast on those desolate southern islands and shores where man rarely intrudes, and in many instances where a churlish climate or a barren soil offers no temptations to him to invade their territory. Le Vaillant, when on Dassen Island, found that the smaller crevices of the rocks served as places of retreat for Penguins, which swarmed there. "This bird," says Le Vaillant, which is about two feet in length, "does not carry its body in the same manner as others: it stands perpendicularly on its two feet, which gives it an air of gravity, so much the more ridiculous as its wings, which have no feathers, hang carelessly down on each side; it never uses them but in swimming. As we advanced towards the middle of the island we met innumerable troops of them. Standing firm and erect on their legs, these animals never deranged themselves in the least to let us pass; they more particularly surrounded the mausoleum, and seemed as if determined to prevent us from approaching it. All the environs were entirely beset with them. Nature had done more for the plain tomb of the poor Danish captain than what proceeds from the imaginations of poets or the chisels of our artists. The hideous owl, however well sculptured in our churches, has not half so dead and melancholy an air as the Penguin. The mournful cries of this animal, mixed with those of the sea-calf, impressed on my mind a kind of gloom which much disposed me to tender sensations of sadness. My eyes were sometime fixed on the last abode of the unfortunate traveller, and I gave his manes the tribute of a sigh." Sir John Narborough says of the Patagonian Penguins that their erect attitude and bluish-black backs, contrasted with their white bellies, might cause them to be taken at a distance for young children with white pinafores on. A line of them is engraved in Webster's "Voyage of the Chanticleer," and reminds us of one of the woodcuts in Hood's "Comic Annual."