become too rare for good
sport: another is to tame and break to the harness certain animals
counted unmanageable. The zebra is one of these. The society has
succeeded perfectly in breaking the zebra and making him work in the
field quite like the horse. An ostrich also allows itself to be
harnessed to a small carriage and to draw two children in it over the
garden. Still another work of the society is to breed new species. A
very beautiful animal has been bred by crossing the wild-ass of Mongolia
with the French variety.

Among the rare animals of the garden may be mentioned the apteryx,
the only bird existing belonging to the same family as the
_Dinornis giganteus_ and the still larger _Epyornis maximus_ of
Madagascar--monstrous wingless birds now extinct. One of the eggs of the
latter in a fossil condition is preserved in the museum of the Garden of
Plants in Paris. Its longer axis is sixteen inches, I think. It is, for
an egg, a most wonderful thing, and on account of its size the bird
laying it has been supposed to be of very much greater size than even
the _Dinornis giganteus_, a perfect skeleton of which exists; but this
seems to be a too hasty conclusion, for the apteryx, a member of the
same family, has laid an egg or two in captivity, and one of these on
being weighed proved to be very nearly one-fourth the whole weight of
the bird, the bird weighing sixty ounces and the egg fourteen and a
half.

The _Tallegalla Lathami_, or brush-turkey of Australia, is another rare
bird. It does not sit upon its eggs, but constructs a sort of hot-bed
for them, which it watches during the whole term as assiduously as a
wise florist does his seeds planted under glass or as a baker does his
ovens. As in the ostrich family, it is the male that has the entire care
of the family from the moment the eggs are laid--a fairer division of
labor than we see in most _menages_. The interesting process of
constructing the hot-bed has been observed several times in Europe. It
is as follows: When the time arrives for the making of the nest the
enclosure is supplied with sticks, leaves and detritus of various kinds.
The male then, with his tail to the centre of the enclosure, commences
with his powerful feet to throw up a mound of the materials furnished.
To do this he walks around in a series of concentric circles. When the
mound is about four feet high the female adds a few artistic touches by
way of smoothing down, evening the surface an