It is scarcely possible to imagine a greater change in habits than that which the members of the ostrich family must suffer, when cooped up in small enclosures under a temperate climate, after freely roaming over desert and tropical plains or entangled forests. Yet almost all the kinds, even the mooruk (_Casuarius Bennettii_) from New Ireland, has frequently produced young in the various European menageries. The African ostrich, though perfectly healthy and living long in the South of France, never lays more than from twelve to fifteen eggs, though in its native country it lays from twenty-five to thirty.[373] Here we have another instance of fertility impaired, but not lost, under confinement, as with the flying squirrel, the hen-pheasant, and two species of American pigeons. Most Waders can be tamed, as the Rev. E. S. Dixon informs me, with remarkable facility; but several of them are short-lived under confinement, so that their sterility in this state is not surprising. The cranes breed more readily than other genera: _Grus montigresia_ has bred several times in Paris and in the Zoological Gardens, as has _G. cinerea_ at the latter place, and _G. antigone_ at Calcutta. Of other members of this great order, _Tetrapteryx paradisea_ has bred at Knowsley, a Porphyrio in Sicily, and the _Gallinula chloropus_ in the Zoological Gardens. On the other hand, several {157} birds belonging to this order will not breed in their native country, Jamaica; and the Psophia, though often kept by the Indians of Guiana about their houses, "is seldom or never known to breed."[374]