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These birds were in great numbers on the plains of Adelaide the year preceding, and had afforded good sport to my friend Torrens; we also observed a flight of pelicans, wheeling about close to the ground, as they had before done to the eastward, as well as a flight of the black-shouldered hawks hovering in the air.
But the bull, a splendid, black-shouldered, heavy-muffled fellow, with the new antlers just beginning to knob out from his massive forehead, appealed to him strongly. The splendid, sullen-looking beast stood among his family, but towered over and seemed unconscious of them.
As to the peacock it is excused on the pleas , that the individuals maintained are so few in number, and that its beauty is so great it can hardly be improved. But the individuals maintained have not been too few for the independent origin of the black-shouldered form, or for the supplanting of the commoner one by it.
It has also been contended that there is something to be said in favour of sudden, as opposed to exceedingly minute and gradual, modifications, even if the latter are not fortuitous. Besides these, the case of the Normandy pigs, of Datura tatula, and also of the black-shouldered peacock, have been spoken of.
Of birds the most numerous were the new pigeon and the black-shouldered hawk; but there was a shrike that frequented the creeks which I should have noticed before. This bird was about the size of a thrush, but had the large head and straight-hooked bill of its species; in colour it was a dirty brownish black, with a white bar across the wings.
To the former category belong the hosts of instances of malformation through arrest of development, and perhaps generally monstrosities of some sort are the result of such affections of the embryo. To the second category belong all cases of hybridism, of cross breed, and in all probability the new varieties and forms, such as the memorable one of the black-shouldered peacock.
In India it is a universal belief among sportsmen that wherever peafowls are common, there tiger will be found. A very beautiful variety which seems to have arisen abruptly in domestication is the so-called "japanned" or black-shouldered peacock named Pavo nigripennis by Mr. Sclater.
But before that second passed he was in mid-air, his legs spread wide like those of a squirrel, falling to the ice-cakes of the swollen river. From the brink above, the grim eyes of the baffled pack flamed down upon him for an instant, and then withdrew. What was a drowned wolf, when there was a winded buck not far ahead? But the black-shouldered wolf was not drowned.
It is also conceivable that such new forms may be endowed with excessive constitutional strength and viability, and with generative prepotency, as was the case with the black-shouldered peacock in Sir J. Trevelyan's flock. This flock was entirely composed of the common kind, and yet the new form rapidly developed itself "to the extinction of the previously existing breed."
On the contrary, it would have been seized upon with avidity and preserved with anxious care. Yet apart from the black-shouldered and white varieties, no tendency to change has been known to show itself. As to its being too beautiful for improvement, that is a proposition which can hardly be maintained.
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