“The good taste of the Amblyornis is not only proved by the nice home it builds. It is a clever bird, called by the inhabitants Buruk Gurea—(master bird),—since it imitates the songs and screamings of numerous birds so well that it brought my hunters to despair, who were but too often misled by the bird. Another name of the bird is Tukan Robon, which means a gardener.” NOTE II. ARS TOPIARIA. THE Romans used the word _Topiarius_ for their ornamental gardener, and one of his chief duties—the _Ars topiaria_ in fact—was to cut the shrubs, and especially box-trees, into figures of ships, animals, and names. There is a well-known passage in one of the letters of the younger Pliny, in which, while speaking of his garden, he describes “a sort of terrace, embellished with various figures, and bounded with a box-hedge, from which you descend by an easy slope, adorned with the representation of divers animals in box answering alternately to each other, into a lawn overspread with the soft, I had almost said the liquid, acanthus: this is surrounded by a walk, enclosed with tonsile evergreens, shaped into a variety of forms. Beyond it is the _gestatio_ [a sort of avenue in which to take exercise] laid out in the form of a circus, ornamented in the middle with box cut in numberless different figures, together with a plantation of shrubs prevented by the shears from running up too high; the whole is fenced in with a wall, covered by box, rising by different ranges to the top.” Further on he says, “Having passed through these several winding alleys, you enter a straight walk, which breaks out into a variety of others, divided off by box-hedges. In one place you have a little meadow; in another the box is cut into a thousand different forms, sometimes into letters expressing the name of the master, sometimes that of the artificer, whilst here and there little obelisks rise intermixed alternately with fruit-trees.”[9] Martial too gives a curious illustration of the _Ars topiaria_. A grove of Plane trees was adorned with _topiarian_ wild beasts,—among them a bear; a young boy thrust his hand into the bear’s wide mouth, and a viper hiding there stung him to death. What a misfortune, adds Martial, that the bear had not been a real one. This _Ars topiaria_ had been for some time in fashion in England when Addison first attacked it in the _Spectator_ of June 25th, 1712: “Our British gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure.”