EXTRACTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE. 5 



beautiful birds, both in song and plumage, and although I prize my small 

 museum, had rather, a hundred times, sit and watch one of these lovely 

 creatures as he did, than possess twenty as stuffed specimens. Putting it 

 on the lowest ground, there is a beauty about a living bird, which no skill 

 in preserving, nor taste in mounting, can ever restore, and I am convinced 

 were this evil, for evil it certainly is, under some control, our choicest 

 kinds would not be so fast vanishing from our eyes as they are. It is 

 chiefly, however, I trust and believe, by the ignorant and coarse-minded 

 that this wholesale havoc is made, for I am certain that did any one of 

 common sense and feeling only allow himself to watch instead of killing, 

 he would seldom or never kill. 



I am convinced that the subject only wants consideration, to shew any 

 one the true line. No doubt modes of preserving fruit and crops may be 

 adopted, and are adopted, but with regard to natural enemies, it were 

 almost impugning the natural order of things to call that in question, and 

 when birds become "vermin," beautiful as they are, I fear they must meet 

 the fate which vermin meet. 



Pembroke Square, Kensington, September, 1856. 



EXTRACTS FROM 

 CORRESPONDENCE WITH A BROTHER NATURALIST. 



RY FREDERICK M. RURTON, ESQ. 

 (Continued from page 221, vol. vi.) 



Who is there that has not wondered at the curious circles so common 

 in our English meadows, sometimes green and sometimes bare, called "Fairy 

 Rings," and when we think of the tales of wonder we have often heard 

 as children in connection with these weird impressions, it seems almost a 

 pity that it should be so determinately settled that they are nothing but 

 the work of eccentric fungi; but let us hear what a learned doctor of the 

 seventeenth century has to tell us on the subject, in the good old days 

 of witches and warlocks, and if it will not alter our ideas respecting their 

 origin, it may perhaps tend to shew on which side of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury we are to look for the golden age. I lately chanced to meet with 

 an old book, printed in the year 1686, written by one Robert Plot, L.L.D., 

 keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and Professor of Chemistry 

 in that University, and dedicated to King James the Second, in which he 

 lays down the law on the subject to his own and no doubt to his reader's 

 satisfaction. I will give you the account in his own words: — "And here 

 we will inquire into the efficient cause of those rings called 'Fairy Circles;' 

 whether they are caused by lightning, or are indeed the rendezvous of 



