their infima species is in our eyes the summum genus. First in dignity, in a scientific point of view, are such men as Wilson and Audubon, who devote their lives to the acquisition of new birds. With knapsack on back and gun in hand, they pierce the trackless forests of North America, and haunt the miasmatic swamps of tropical Africa, with equal disdain of danger, thinking themselves amply repaid can they add a hitherto unknown owl or flamingo to the records of their science. Devotedly attached to this, the adventurous side of ornithology, many men spend a season in some such occupation, even if they cannot offer their whole lives to their mistress. Could they find the roc's egg, their enthusiasm would not object to Sindbad's adventures as a necessary preliminary; and as for the quest of the Sangreal, the probabilities of the great auk being found outside the Arctic circle present a far deeper source of interest to their minds. All honour to these martyrs of science, who dare heat, and cold, and hardness, and even death in her service. Without their labours there would be nothing for their theoretical counterparts, the stayat-home enthusiasts, to work upon. Classification and analogies, varieties and abnormal groups, all that absorbing terminology of the eager ornithologist, could have no exist ence, or would but remain the shadowy forms of hypotheses where with an ornithological cloud cuckooland might be filled. But the cases of rare skins preserved by arsenical soap, which are continually being despatched to our shores by the working ornithologists, stimulate their learned but sedentary brethren, and enable the latter to test the value of their own provisional guesses on classification. Were it not for these specimens the cabinets and soirées of London ornithologists would be very barren of interest.

And we must do these theoretical lovers of birds the justice to say, that if they were not thus enthusiastic in the cause of their favourite science, the public would know even less than it does at present (witness the drawing of the recent Small Birds Preservation Act) of British ornithology.

There is, however, a more advanced form of ornithological specu-lation than this, and the students of it seem more visionary theorists to plain men than even the last-mentioned class. To themselves and their admirers they appear, on the other hand, to be ultra scientificmen far in advance of their own time. It would be invidious to mention names, but those in the least acquainted with this subject can without difficulty recognise the type. Ordinary men are mystified when they find these ornithologists appending such unknown quantities to their lists and specimens of birds as 3 and 9. The cere, the tarsus, and the speculum, are parts of birds and plumage never long absent from their mouths. They adopt the newest nomenclature of birds, discarding the old-fashioned authorities of our youth, and being proportionately delighted with modern classifications. The most technical papers of the Ibis, which would repel an ordinary man, not to say a good and skilful ornithologist, are to them a source of the deepest pleasure. They have a great love for multiplying species and detecting abnormal variations of plumage, &c. Observations on the habits and migrations of our native birds are thrown away upon this class of naturalists. Birds are nothing to them until they can be skinned and placed in the cabinet. Their history in the flesh 'they leave to inferior intellects that will condescend to the subject. But to have a pile of skins from Spitzbergen or Abyssinia is a praiseworthy ambition; while to have discovered a dark-coloured specimen of Cinclus

aquaticus (the common dipper) and to have started, a theory that it is the Scandinavian variety (Cinclus melanogaster) is to have earned a title to immortality. White of Selborne, in their eyes, was but a misguided observer, who devoted himself to robins, tits, and swallows, their ways and their nests, totally neglecting theories of correlation, migration, and transition in bird life. He is almost as far removed from the scientific man of the present day, as the pre-historic cavedwellers are from the Fellows of the Royal Society. The lower forms of this type are simply collectors of rarities. They may be found with Jerdon's Birds of India in their hand, naming and arranging a case of the hirundinidæ from the Himalayas. Mr. Marks has given us an exact portrayal of one in his Ornithologist of this year's Academy. The old man with a stuffed flamingo under one arm and a crane under the other, while a bee-eater, oriole, and king-fisher are in a case at his side, is a type of the highest theoretical bird-lover at his lowest estate. Ornithology is for him made up of specimens.

The ideal ornithologist whom we reverence (he may be called ideal, for how seldom is he actually met in real life!) is the man who combines the utmost love of birds, and the deepest knowledge of their habits, with a large fund of educated sympathies for the beautiful in all its manifestations, for nature, and for man. The outward shows of sky and earth, Of hill and valley, he has viewed; And impulses of deeper birth

Have come to him in solitude. As with Wordsworth himself, the woods and fields, which are the haunts of the creatures he studies, seem to him glorified with something of brightness which ordinary eyes fail to perceive; but he has none of the egotism which so disfigured that poet's character. Perhaps he might be more aptly

compared with Thoreau. But the American philosopher-naturalist lived a life too remote from human sympathies to match the hearty human affections of the man who, from loving birds, has found his heart softened and enlarged towards his fellow-men. Instinctively, White of Selborne comes into the mind, as the best type of an English ornithologist. Who does not know his daily employments, as well as if he had lived with him, from his inimitable History? We see him in the cool of the summer evening walking to the Hanger to test the echo on the hill-side beyond, and meanwhile watching his favourite birds, the swifts, as, with many a shrill cry, they describe wide circles over his head; or perhaps he rests on a stile to please himself with the monotonous jarring of the fern owl, and detect in what key the brown owls hoot. Though mainly a lover of birds, he has his eye on the trout that leaps at the first mayfly of the year, and on the water-rat feeding off the arrow-head near the bank; he 'suspects much,' as he muses, 'that there may be two species of water-rats.' Passing a neighbour's house he notices that the trains of his peacocks 'appear by no means to be their tails; those long feathers growing not from their uropygium, but all up their backs.' Then succeeds a kindly chat with some gipsies, from whom he learns the healing properties of the hempnettle; next he philosophises on the use of rushes for candle-making as he passes a boggy spot, and determines to write a letter to the Honourable Daines Barrington on the same. To this ensues a talk with the gamekeeper on a honeybuzzard which has been lately shot, and a visit is paid to render the ministrations of his pastoral office to the man's aged mother. Returning he picks up some bird-nesting boys and surveys their treasures. Timothy, the favourite tortoise, is

looked up ere nightfall, and a lettuce brought for his supper, with the reflection that it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two-thirds of its existence in a joyless stupor.' Then the simple scholar may be easily fancied calling together his bachelor establishment for prayers, and going off to bed at ten o'clock, in order to be up with the sun and note how often the flycatcher brought food to its young in the nest over the verandah during an hour. It is impossible to think without secret sympathy, in these busy times, of the contented retired naturalist spending many a day over his hippobosca or the nesting of the housemartin, totally indifferent meanwhile to the distant rumble of American troubles and the revolutionary atrocities which were convulsing France nearer home. For the rest he probably fell in with the easy notions of the last century clergymen respecting their duties. Nature and the poets were his unfailing solace. We possess a few of his autograph sermons, abounding in the religious saws and didactic platitudes of the time. They are, curiously enough, written throughout in fair round hand, without an erasure or sign of hurry from beginning to end, proving thereby to our professional eyes that they have been copied, and that their writer, Fellow of Oriel though he was, was too lazy to undertake original composition. Docketed too on their covers appear the dates and places where he had preached them, and from each having done duty year after year (with occasionally a rest of a twelvemonth intervening) at Selborne and the neighbouring villages, it is abundantly clear that he did not take the trouble to copy out many dis

courses.

These little traits throw a flood of light upon the character of our typical ornithologist. Amiable, genial, and observant, disliking interruption, and fond of scholarly leisure, it is not surprising that he could not rise above the level of that lukewarm eighteenth century in the higher duties of his sacred calling.

Contrast White with an American who, with a certain resemblance to him in his love of birds and outward nature, is yet totally dissimilar in his mode of viewing them, and in the whole literary aspect of his life. In a pleasant essay on My Garden Acquaintance, James R. Lowell presents us with a Transatlantic type of what we deem the most enjoyable form of ornithology. He does not greatly care to note the arrivals or departures of his feathered friends in a register with a view to striking an average and establishing the exact day on which the advent of the song-sparrow may

be expected; but if he can connect their comings and goings, their song and their nesting, with a grotesque thought or with one of his own light-hearted moods, it is to him a deep gratification. Thus while his readers make the acquaintance of the bobolinks, catbirds, and orioles that he watched from his study windows, they insensibly find themselves at the same time acquiring a friendly regard for the learned observer amongst his books, who assimilates every phase of avine character, and in turn endows his pets with so many human likings and frailties. Does he see a rose-breasted grosbeak busy amongst his raspberries, he hopes she is 'prospecting with a view to settlement in the garden.' If a robin has swallowed an immense lob-worm (which the American robins, being only migratory redbreasted thrushes, frequently do), he notices how he stands up in honest self-confidence, expands his red waistcoat with the virtuous air

of a lobby member, and outfaces you with an eye that calmly challenges enquiry-Do I look like a bird that knows the flavour of raw vermin?' Again 'the crow is very comical as a lover, and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint-Preux standard has something of the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson. Yet there are few things to my ear more melodious than his caw of a clear winter morning as it drops to you filtered through five hundred fathoms of crisp blue air.' There is a humour and sprightly bonhommie in all his remarks which are missed in Gilbert White, though it would be hard to say which is the more genial ornithologist. Mr. Lowell's garden must be a pleasant place, and we seem to know its every hole and corner, to view the 'flickers' running up and down the dead limbs of his elms, and to hear the one quail which inhabited it calling 'Bob White! Bob White!' amongst the currant bushes.

We should have been obliged, with the American bird-lover, to condone the numerous offences of the cuckoos against the cherries, and even to suffer ourselves to be bullied by the humming-bird 'couching his long bill like a lance, his throat sparkling with angry fire,' provided they could have been induced to accept the freedom of the garden. Ere now a pair of irate missel-thrushes have scolded us on our own lawn in the best bird-Billingsgate, for venturing too near their nest. Much is the lover of birds indebted to such ornithologists as White and Lowell -men who interpret for their less sagacious brethren the secrets of bird-life, their friendships and animosities, their cunning and yet their ignorance of weather-wisdom, who hit off a bird's character in its song, 'and wide unclasp the tables

of their thoughts' if they can but catch a glimpse of their bearing in their native haunts. Christopher North, with all his keen delight in birds and appreciation of Nature, could never reach this insight. He writes with many a gush of enthusiasm indeed about these Minnesingers of the woods,' and his eagles soar into the blue empyrean to heights where none but a poet's eye can follow them; but we miss that careful observation and faithful treasuring of every movement of a bird which the true ornithologist seizes as elements of its character. Owls were favourite birds of the Professor's, but he lets us into none of their secrets. Their name does but act as a factor in a long chain of poetic associations. 'How serenely beautiful their noiseless flight; a flake of snow is not winnowed through the air more softly-silent! Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, how spiritual the motionhow like the thoughts of a dream !? And then we have 'the long quivering lines of light,' • the evening star,'' the glorious pheno menon of the double moon,' 'the bright colours of the woods,' &c., all doubtless very beautiful, but not ornithology.

The transition is very wide between men such as we have just mentioned, who dwell upon the personal traits, so to speak, of separate birds, and those who busy themselves with the habits of whole species. These are incomparably more scientific. They work perseveringly, but mostly in very isolated situations, amidst neighbours who look upon their pursuits as an amiable lunacy, at the laws which regulate the migra tions, plumage, periodicity of the different families appearing on our shores in greater or fewer numbers, &c. These problems are the legitimate work of ornithology as an