52 The Scottish JVatiira/ist. 



destruction of his spoil would at least be checked ; or if he 

 proved not amenable to such reasoning, should be forcibly pre- 

 vented and heavily punished. But a remedy for checking birds'- 

 nesting in the intelligent boy who wishes to avoid wantonness, 

 but at the same time claims a right to make his collection of 

 eggs as much as another collector has one to make his of butter- 

 flies or birds, must be sought in another direction, and is worth 

 the consideration of lovers both of birds and of intelligent and 

 inquiring schoolboys. 



In passing it must be remarked that schoolboys alone are not 

 to be blamed for purposeless birds'-nesting, and it would be unfair 

 to pass over as great a culprit — the amateur adult collector, whose 

 condemnation should be as much greater as is his opportunity of 

 knowing better. It has been well remarked that few, if any, 

 advances have been made by human beings in their history 

 but have been accompanied by a concomitant development of 

 special vices, originating in a perverted application or use of the 

 benefits gained by the advance. The form which this aberration 

 assumes in connection with the rise and progress of Biological 

 science is as a mania for amassing large collections of animal 

 structures, whether shells or birds' eggs, or the animals them- 

 selves, without any reference whatever to their structure or 

 history, or to the educational purpose they might serve, when 

 this latter exists at all. When you see in the drawers of a col- 

 lector of birds' eggs a long series of the eggs of the kingfisher or 

 a wild duck, not one egg in each series differing in any way from 

 another, the inane purposelessness of the thing — not to use any 

 stronger term — is evident. No clearer proof could be given that 

 the great majority of egg-collecting — that is, by others than school- 

 boys — arises from a barbarous desire of possession alone, than 

 that it is seldom if ever accompanied by the collecting of birds* 

 Jiests, from which probably much more is to be learned of bird 

 history than from the eggs. I need only refer to the learned 

 observations of Pouchet on the changes which he remarked in 

 the building of the nests of species of Hinindo^ to instance the 

 interesting and important results which a study of nests might 

 lead us to. 



Compare the nest of a chaffinch with those of its congeners 

 the greenfinch or the bullfinch, or that of a sedge warbler with 

 that of the wood-wren : how totally different they are, one feels 

 inclined to say, — comparing incom parables, more different than 

 the birds themselves. Or to go further, compare one chaffinch's 



