The Scottish Naturalist. 97 



proceeds, as has been above stated, as far south as Africa, 

 leaving the Chaffinch behind it: Though I have said that 

 food is not the sole cause of migration, yet that birds do, in 

 some miraculous way, discover the existence of particular kinds 

 of food suited to them, and make a sudden descent on some 

 particular locality where it is unusually abundant, let it be ever 

 so distant, is an undoubted fact. 



Thus, in the year 1593, which was said to be a great apple 

 year, immense flights of Crossbills visited the orchards in 

 England, and the following is an extract from a quaint old 

 account mentioned by Bewick : — " In the apple season of this 

 year an immense multitude of unknown birds came into 

 England, and though the fruit was pretty well ripened, they 

 entirely neglected its pulp, swallowing nothing but the pipins. 

 Nobody had seen such birds, or had heard of them from the 

 oldest persons ; and what in them is chiefly to be admired, 

 they were so tame, and gentle, and innocent, that they seemed 

 to have flown hither from some desert wholly uninhabited by 

 man. They suffered themselves patiently to be attacked by 

 slings and cross-bows, never thinking of flying off, till some of 

 them, stricken by stones, or apples, or leaden bullets, fell dead 

 from the trees. Finally, whether they came in quest of the 

 food they lived upon or not, as soon as the apples were gone 

 they all disappeared, but no one knows whither they went." 



In the year 1838, a most wonderful year for the super- 

 abundance of cones on the spruce trees, we were visited in the 

 Carse of Gowrie by hundreds of Crossbills, and many were 

 seen in the following year, but not in such numbers. I 

 have never seen them in the same locaHty since, or have I ever 

 again noticed the cones to be anything Hke in the same 

 quantities as they were that year. Mr. Cordeaux, in his Birds 

 of the Humber district, mentions two other instances, of the 

 Brambling (Fringilla montifringilla) : '* During the winter of 

 1860-61, when the Beechmast was so plentiful, hundreds of 

 these birds visited the neighbourhood of Swinhope, and that 

 large flocks also arrived in the neighbourhood of Beverley in 

 the autumn of 1864, in which year there was likewise an abun- 

 dance of Beechmasts;" and there are many instances of the 

 same nature regarding other birds on record. 



The arrival and departure of birds of passage, though some- 

 times almost to a day in the foniier, is not always so regular in 

 the latter, both being much influenced by the weather and 



