follows the plough in company with the black-headed gulls, molothri, Guira cuckoos, and tyrant-birds, and clumsily gleans amongst the fresh-turned mould for worms and larvæ. He also attends the pigs when they are rooting on the plain to share any succulent treasuretrove turned up by their snouts; for he is not a bird that allows dignity to stand between him and his dinner. In the autumn, on damp, sultry days, the red ants, that make small conical mounds on the pampas, are everywhere seen swarming, and rising high in the air they form a little cloud or column, and hang suspended for hours over the same spot. On such days the milvagos fare sumptuously on little insects, and under each cloud of winged ants several of them are to be seen in company with a few fly-catchers, or other diminutive species, briskly running about to pick up the falling manna, their enjoyment undisturbed by any sense of incongruity.

Before everything, however, the chimango is a vulture, and is to be found at every solitary rancho sharing with dogs and poultry the offal and waste meat thrown out on the dust-heap; or, after the flock has gone to pasture, tearing at the eyes and tongue of a dead lamb in the sheepfold. When the hide has been stripped from a dead horse or cow on the plains, the chimango is always first on the scene. While feeding on a carcass it incessantly utters a soliloquy of the most lamentable notes, as if protesting against the hard necessity of having to put up with such carrion fare; long, querulous cries, resembling the piteous whines of a shivering puppy chained up in a bleak back yard and all its wants neglected, but infinitely more doleful in character. The gauchos have a saying comparing a man who grumbles at good fortune to the chimango crying on a carcass ; an extremely expressive saying to those who have listened to the distressful wailings of the bird over its meat. In winter a carcass attracts a great concourse of the black-winged gulls; for with the cold weather these vultures of the sea abandon their breeding places on the Atlantic shores to wander in search of food over the vast inland pampas. The dead beast is quickly surrounded by a host of them, and the poor chimango crowded out; one at least, however, is usually to be seen perched on the carcass tearing at the flesh, and at intervals with outstretched neck and ruffled-up plumage uttering a succession of its strange wailing cries, reminding one of a public orator mounted on a rostrum and addressing harrowing appeals to a crowd of attentive listeners. When the carcass has finally been abandoned by foxes, armadillos, gulls, and caracaras, the chimango still clings sorrowfully to it, eking out a miserable existence by tearing at a fringe of gristle and whetting his hungry beak on the bones.

Though an inordinate lover of carrion, a wise instinct has taught it that this aliment is unsuited to the tender stomachs of its fledglings; these it feeds almost exclusively on the young of small birds. In November, the chimangos are seen incessantly beating over the cardoon bushes, after the manner of hen-harriers; for at this season in the cardoons breeds the Coryphistera alaudina. This bird, the sole member of its genus, and called téru-réru del campo by the natives, is excessively shy and mouse-like in its habits, seldom showing itself, and, by means of strong legs and a long, slender, wedge-like body, is able to glide swiftly as a snake through and under the grass. In summer one hears its long melancholy trilling call-note from a cardoon bush, but if approached it drops to the ground and vanishes. Under the densest part of the cardoon bush it scoops out a little circular hollow in the soil, and constructs over it a dome of woven grass and thorns, leaving only a very small aperture: it lines the floor with dry horse-dung, and lays five buff-coloured eggs. So admirably is the nest concealed that I have searched every day for one through a whole breeding season without being rewarded with a single find. Yet they are easily found by the chimango. In the course of a single day I have examined five or six broods of their young, and, by pressing a finger on their distended crops, made them disgorge their food, and found in every instance that they had been fed on nothing but the young of the téru-réru. I was simply amazed at this wholesale destruction of the young of a species so secret in its nesting habits; for no eye, even of a hawk, can pierce through the leafage of a cardoon bush, ending near the surface in an accumulated mass of the dead and decaying portions of the plant. The explanation of the chimango's success is to be found in the loquacious habit of the fledglings it preys on, a habit common in the young of Dendrocolaptine species. The intervals between the visits of the parent birds with food they spend in conversing together in their high-pitched tones. If a person approaches the solid fabric of the ovenbird, Furnarius rufus, when there are young in it, he will hear shrill laughter-like notes and little choruses like those uttered by the old birds, only feebler; but in the case of this species, no harm can result from the loquacity of the young, since the castle they inhabit is impregnable. Hovering over the cardoons, the chimango listens for the stridulous laughter of the fledglings, and when he hears it the thorny covering is quickly pierced and the dome broken into.

Facts like this bring before us with startling vividness the struggle for existence, showing what great issues in the life of a species may depend on matters so trivial, seemingly, that to the uninformed mind

they appear like the merest dust in the balance which is not regarded. And how tremendous and pitiless is that searching law of the survival of the fittest in its operations when we see a species like the Coryphistera, in the fashioning and perfecting of which nature seems to have exhausted all her art, so exquisitely is it adapted in structure, coloration, and habits to the one great object of concealment, yet apparently doomed to destruction through this one petty oversightthe irrepressible garrulity of the fledglings in their nest! It is, however, no oversight at all; since the law of natural selection is not prophetic in its action, and only preserves such variations as are beneficial in existing circumstances, without anticipating changes in the conditions. The settlement of the country has no doubt caused a great increase of chimangos, and in some indirect way probably served to quicken their intelligence; thus a change in the conditions which have moulded the Coryphistera brings a danger to it from an unexpected quarter. The situation of the nest exposes it, one would imagine, to attacks from snakes and small mammals, from birdkilling spiders, beetles, and crickets, yet these subtle ground foes have missed it, while the baby-laughter of the little ones in their cradle has called down an unlooked-for destroyer from above. It might be answered that this must be very numerous species, otherwise the milvago could not have acquired the habit of finding the nests; that when they become rarer, the pursuit will be given over, after which the balance will readjust itself. But in numbers there is safety, especially for a feeble hunted species, unable from its peculiar structure to vary its manner of life. "Rarity," observes Darwin, "is the precursor to extinction."

W. H. HUDSON.

FOUFFROY, THE INVENTOR OF

F

THE STEAMBOAT.

RANCHE-COMTE is a land of mountains and forests, famous

for the pastures on its hill-sides, and chiefly rich in its herds of cattle; a land almost half of which is even now heath and marsh. In the middle of the last century the province, as a consequence of its nature and its history, was perhaps the most backward in France, of which it had only become a part under Louis XIV. Old feudal châteaux still stood amid lands tilled by the labour of serfs, and the manners of an elder day still lingered in the hamlets. There were no special industries, save cheese-making on the farms, charcoalburning in the forests, and clock-making around Besançon, the chief town; indeed, in all enterprise the province seemed left hopelessly behind. The great canal of the Rhone and Rhine was not made till after the war of American Independence, when it gave employment to the soldiers who had come back; while the river Doubs was only navigable by small boats, and at certain seasons of the year. Yet it was on this river that Jouffroy tried his first steamboat, and it was from one of the old châteaux of Franche-Comté that there came an invention which revolutionised the commerce of the world.

To us the eighteenth century scems characterised by the movement of destruction which led up to the final outburst of the Revolution; but the century of Voltaire and Rousseau was also that of Priestley and Lavoisier, of Arkwright and Watt. In fact it was in this century, as a result of the physical discoveries of the preceding, that the great application of science to industry took place, that man converted to his use the forces of the inorganic worldthe greatest material advance since our nomad ancestors made subject allies of other animal races. In its effect on the workers, indeed, it was perhaps less noticeable than their personal emancipation, or than the subsequent separation of the functions of master and workman; but even thus considered, it is difficult to overestimate the change effected, the facilities for combination and for the spread of new ideas afforded by the massing of the hands in large

factories and large cities, and by the improvement in the means of communication. To it we owe the extinction of that industry of the cottage, where the father taught his sons their trade, and the family worked together in the home. By it great marts have arisen on the shores of the Pacific, and western Europe has come face to face with the old civilisations of China and Japan; by it the barren valleys of Lancashire and Yorkshire have become densely peopled, while the life of the city with its aspirations and its dangers has become more and more attractive. So in our material progress good and evil are now blended; but the race which made war amenable to social discipline, so that the character of the warrior became a noble type, can have little difficulty in making peaceful industry also submit to this discipline; and then these triumphs of the industrial spirit, which now seem so ambiguous, will take their proper place as part of the rich inheritance of the past.

But in all discoveries a long anterior preparation is needed. The application of science to practical life required a previous elaboration of theory, which was only completed after the lapse of ages. In this all sorts and conditions of men took part: priests of the Sun and Alexandrian mathematicians, Christian monks and Arab philosophers, astrologers and alchemists. At length there came the physical investigations of Galileo: Stevin, Torricelli, and Pascal discovered that the air had weight, and Boyle, the law of its elasticity; and then in the fulness of time arose the idea of steam as a power in industry. Hero, in the great days of the school of Alexandria, had noted the force of heated air; but no advance in this direction was possible until the seventeenth century. Legend, however, has been busy with the early history of the steam-engine. In Germany there is shown the idol of the great god Perkunas, in which, apparently by steam, astonishing effects were wrought, to the terror of the Wendic peoples, that they might know that Perkunas was god; whence the invention has been placed in the primeval forests of the North. Again, according to some, Blasco de Garay crossed the harbour of Barcelona in a vessel moved by steam, a century before the great discoveries in physics; and later, Marion Delorme and the Marquis of Worcester encountered mad Salomon de Caus on the threshold of his cell in Bicêtre, boasting that with boiling water alone he could make chariots move and weights rise up. Salomon, indeed, is known to have used heat to raise the water in fountains; but, unfortunately for the story, he seems not to have been in Bicêtre at the time supposed. With Worcester's name we at last emerge into the light, for in his "Century of Inventions,"