is a bird which has been described under its generic name Emberiza (Encycl.); but there is one species, the orange-bellied bunting of Latham, of which M. Villain relates some particulars certainly not unworthy of notice in this place.

"The female of this beautiful bird (says he) has the simple colours of the sky-lark, and a short horizontal tail, like that of almost all other birds; the male, on the contrary, is wholly black except at the shoulder of the wing, where there is a large red patch; and his tail is long, ample, and vertical, like that of the common cock. But this brilliant plumage and fine vertical tail subsist only during the season of love, which continues six months. This period over, he lays aside his splendid habiliments, and assumes the more modest dress of his mate. The most extraordinary circumstance is, that the vertical tail also changes to a horizontal one, and the male so exactly resembles the female, that it is not possible to distinguish them from each other.

"The female has her turn. When she reaches a certain

(a) A bar is about the value of three shillings and sixpence. tain age, and has lost the faculty of propagating the species, she clothes herself for the remainder of her days in the garb which the male had temporarily assumed; her tail, like his at that period, grows long, and, like his also, from horizontal becomes vertical.

"The birds of this species associate together, live in a sort of republic, and build their nests near to each other. The society usually consists of about four score females; but whether, by a particular law of nature, more females are produced than males, or for any other reason of which I am ignorant, there are never more than twelve or fifteen males to this number of females, who have them in common."

According to our author, this transmutation is by no means confined to this particular species of bunting. Many females of the feathered creation, when they grow so old as to cease laying eggs, assume the more splendid colours of the male, which they retain during the remainder of their lives. This fact is strikingly perceptible in those species in which the male and female very much differ in colour, as the golden pheasant of China, for instance. In some species, and those not a few, the male alone regularly changes his colour, and assumes once in a year the plumage of the female; so that at a certain period all the birds of that species appear females. "I have in my possession (says our author) specimens of more than fifty of those changing species, in all their transitions from one hue to another; and the change is sometimes so great, that a person would suppose himself to see individuals totally different. A closet-naturalist, for instance, showed me four birds as so many different species, and even as not belonging to the same genus, with which I was well acquainted, and which I knew to be the same bird, only of different ages."

Such changes as these, could they be proved to take place occasionally among domestic fowls, would in some measure account for strange stories of cocks laying eggs, which we have heard related by persons whose general veracity was never questioned.