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Updated: May 6, 2025
"Oh, yes," said the major, "they row well enough, but so did the old galley-slaves in the convict boats. Now, I won't use my revolver yet, but I've got four cartridges of BB shot that were meant for cassowaries or wild swans. Now, Mark, I think I'll give our friends their first peppering with them." "They will not kill, will they, sir?" said Mark anxiously.
Needless, perhaps, to say that the skin proved a fraud, being nothing more than a Barnum contrivance made up out of the skins of a dozen ostriches and cassowaries, and most cleverly put together by Chinese workmen; at least, such was the report made on it by Sir Peter Grebe, who had been sent by the British Society to Antwerp to examine the acquisition.
Here again naturalists must look forward to that information which longer and more intimate knowledge of the feathered tribe than I can supply, shall appear. I have nevertheless had the good fortune to see what was never seen but once, in the country I am describing, by Europeans a hatch, or flock, of young cassowaries with the old bird. I counted ten, but others said there were twelve.
I see Westwood in the Annals brings forward the same case, arguing that the ostriches should have acquired better wings within the historic period; but as they are now the swiftest of animals they evidently do not want their wings, which in their present state may serve some other trifling purpose in their economy such as fans, or balancers, which may have prevented their being reduced to such rudiments as in the cassowaries.
Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and crows must all be comparatively recent immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. Even in this respect, however, the Australian life-region still bears an antiquated and undeveloped aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find those very oldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries, the emus, and the mooruk of New Britain.
If this were the case, the existence of cassowaries and of marsupial quadrupeds, both in New Guinea and in Australia, becomes intelligible; while the difference between the littoral molluscs of the north and the south shores of Torres Straits is readily explained by the great probability that, when the depression in question took place, and what was, at first, an arm of the sea became converted into a strait separating Australia from New Guinea, the northern shore of this new sea became tenanted with marine animals from the north, while the southern shore was peopled by immigrants from the already existing marine Australian fauna.
He had received from the Indies, by the last ships, two ostriches or cassowaries which were shut up and much prized, though they are very common in Holland.
They are cassowaries, with drooping dark-brown feathers that look rather out of curl, and necks of crimson and blue. Further on there is a family of ostriches, the great father bird very grand and with a black coat, and magnificent white tail-feathers those feathers that ladies buy for their hats, and for which they give so much money.
THE native boats that had come to meet us were three or four in number, containing in all about fifty men. They were long canoes, with the bow and stern rising up into a beak six or night feet high, decorated with shells and waving plumes of cassowaries hair.
This is the proper business of genus and species: and this men do without any consideration of real essences, or substantial forms; which come not within the reach of our knowledge when we think of those things, nor within the signification of our words when we discourse with others. Instance in Cassowaries. Were I to talk with any one of a sort of birds I lately saw in St.
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