160 FRANCIS H. HERRICK 



vertebrates below the level of man have ever carried the art of 

 building to the same degree of perfection and elaboration of 

 detail. It is further interesting to notice that the only inverte- 

 brates which feed their young, and care directly for their various 

 needs, are bees, ants, and termites, and the only vertebrates, 

 birds and mammals, all of which represent the greatest nest- 

 builders of the world. 



Both the eggs and the nests of birds, in relation to the build- 

 ers, have often been the first objects to open the eyes and kindle 

 the zeal of the born naturalist, and often too the only ones to 

 arouse even a spark of enthusiasm for natural history in others, 

 on whom the harder and dryer facts of science fall as on barren 

 ground. The delicate and often beautifully colored eggs of 

 birds, like the sea shells tossed upon the beach, have been sought 

 by collectors for over two hundred years, but with all due regard 

 for many students of exceptional merit, they seem to have led 

 to little more than a pseudo science of oology, while we some- 

 times hear of the study of nests mentioned in undertone as 

 " caliology." Biology does not scorn the shell of the egg, any 

 more than the jeweller despises the case of the watch, but it 

 points to the vastly greater interest and importance of the 

 going mechanism inside. 



It is a singular fact that with all the popular and scientific 

 interest presented by the nests of wild birds, which have been 

 celebrated as beautiful and adaptive structures from antiquity, 

 and are found in every clime, this interest, with a few notable 

 exceptions, should have stopped with an admiration for their 

 beauty or a description of the finished work, with but scattering 

 notes upon the variability of certain species in relation to habit 

 and environment, and still less upon the actions of the builders 

 at work. In many ways, it would be difficult indeed, from the 

 standpoint of the student of instinct and behavior, to find a 

 more unsatisfactory class of scientific literature than that which 

 deals with the nests of birds. 



Among a number of popular or semi-scientific books upon 

 the nests and nest-life of birds, one of the earliest, by Rennie,^ 

 the editor of Montagu's Ornithological Dictionary, was excellent 

 in its day, and like his other works on the " Habits," and the 

 " Faculties of Birds," in spite of the errors which it must inevit- 



' Rennie, James: Bird Architecture. London, 1831. 



