Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/766

 more easily, the Malay and Chinese traders concluded that they had none; and all sorts of stories were told about their living continually on the wing, and being, in fact, birds of heaven, whence originated the names of "birds of paradise" and "birds of the sun" given them by the early Portuguese and Dutch writers. Down to 1760 the skins of these birds never reached Europe with feet attached to them, and the great Linnaeus recorded the fact by naming the largest kind Paradisea apoda, or footless bird of paradise, a name by which it is still known among men of science. The natives also generally cut off the wings, so as to give greater prominence to the ornamental feathers; and this gives the birds an altogether different appearance from what they really possess in a living state, or when properly preserved.

By far the greater number of these birds, and those of the richest colors and most remarkable plumage, live on the mainland of New Guinea, and they are especially abundant in the mountains of the northwestern peninsula, where the Italian and German naturalists already referred to obtained fine specimens of all the known kinds. In the southeast one new species has been discovered, but only two or three sorts are found there; and as they are also in little variety in the lowland districts of the northwest, it becomes pretty certain that they are more especially mountain birds. We may therefore confidently expect that, when the great ranges of the interior are visited and explored by naturalists, other and perhaps still more wonderful species will be discovered. It is interesting to note that, with the exception of one very peculiar species discovered by myself in the Moluccas, all the birds of paradise are found within the hundred-fathom line around New Guinea, and therefore on lands which have probably been connected with it at a comparatively recent period.

Why such wonderful birds should have been developed here and nowhere else is a mystery we shall perhaps never completely solve; but it is probably connected with the absence of the higher types of mammalia, and with the protection afforded by luxuriant equatorial forests. The only other country in which similar strange developments of plumage and equally superb colors are found is equatorial America, where somewhat similar conditions prevail, and where mammalia of a low grade of organization have long predominated. Whatever may be the causes at work, their action has not been restricted to the paradise-birds. Nowhere else in the world are pigeons and parrots so numerous and so beautiful as in New Guinea. The great crowned pigeons, the largest of the whole family and rivaling the largest game-birds, were first described by Dampier as "a stately land-fowl about the size of the dunghill cock, sky-colored, but with a white blotch and reddish spots about the wings, and a long bunch of feathers on the crown." Many of the fruit-doves are strikingly beautiful, being adorned with vivid patches of crimson, blue, or yellow, on a pure green ground. Parrots are wonderfully varied, including the great black and the white