IUCBTJRUS. 199

during the last six weeks at least fifty nests, and in many cases
where we had left the empty nest in statu quo, we found it a week
later with a fresh batch of eggs laid therein. Many birds will
never return to a nest which has once been robbed, but others, like
the King-Crow and the Little Shrike (Lanius vittatus), will continue
laying even after the nest has been twice robbed. The very day after
the nest has been cleared of perhaps four slightly incubated eggs, a
fresh one that otherwise would assuredly never have seen the light
is Laid, and that, too, a fertile egg, which, if not meddled with, wilt
be hatched off in due course. It might be supposed that imme-
diately on discovering their loss, nature urged the birds to new
intercourse, the result of which was the fertile egg, and this, in
some cases, is probably really the case; Martins and others of the
Swallow kind being often to be seen busy with £ love's pleasing
labour' before their eggs have been well stowed away by the col-
lector. But this will not account for instances that I have
observed of birds in confinement, who separated from the male
before they had laid their full number, and then later, just when
they began to sit deprived of their eggs, straightway laid a second
set, neither so large nor so well coloured as the first, but still
fertile eggs that were duly hatched. But for the removal of the
first set, these subsequent eggs would never have been developed
or laid. Now, the theory has always been that the contact of the
sperm- and germ-cells causes the development and fertilization of
the latter. In these cases no fresh accession of sperm-cells was
possible, and hence it would seem as if in some birds the female
organs were able to store up living sperm-cells, which only work
to fertilize and develop ova in the event of some accident render-
ing it necessary, and which otherwise ultimately lose vitality and
pass away without action.

" The nest of the King-Crow that we took was of the ordinary type ;
in fact I have noticed scarcely any difference in the shape or mate-
rials of all the numerous nests of this common bird that I have yet
seen. They are all composed of tiny twigs and fine grass-stems,
and the roots of the khus-khus grass, as a rule, neatly and tightly
woven together, and exteriorly bound round with a good deal of
cobweb, in which a few feathers are sometimes entangled. The
cavity is broad and shallow, and at times lined with horsehair or
fine grass, but most commonly only with khus. The bottom of the
nest is very thin, but the sides or rim rather firm and thick; in
this case the cavity was 4 inches in diameter, and about li in
depth, and contained three pure white glossless eggs. In the very
next tree, however (a mango, and this is perhaps their favourite
tree), was another similar nest, containing four eggs, slightly glossy,
with a salmon-pink tinge throughout, and numerous well-marked
brownish-red specks and spots, most numerous towards the large
end, looking vastly like Brobdingnagian specimens of the Eocket-
bird's eggs. The variation in this bird's eggs is remarkable; out
of more than one hundred eggs nearly one third have been pure
white, and between the dead glossless purely white egg and a