166 FRANCIS H. HERRICK 



insight into the architecture peculiar to its species. It sees the 

 position of its nest, it notes the materials, and when it requires 

 one for itself, is it so extraordinary that, profiting by such ex- 

 perience, it builds one on the same plan? " To the question 

 thus temptingly put, we should be inclined to answer: No 

 indeed! Not if the nestling is such a precocious prodigy as you 

 suppose, but we could as soon believe that it might evolve a 

 kind of Gothic architecture, by seeing the trees meet over its 

 head, as our early ancestors are supposed to have done in the 

 woods of Germany. One might be inclined to further ask w^hat 

 kind of mental notes the young of the esculent swiftlet {Collo- 

 calia fuciphaga) would be likely to make, inasmuch as they 

 are born in a darkened cave, and on a little bracket of glue, 

 which represents the hardened secretion of the salivary glands 

 of their parents, — or the precocious chicks of the ocellated 

 Megapode, which after hatching have to dig their way to liberty 

 through several feet of earth, and in order to determine the 

 remarkable character of their peculiar mound nests, man finds 

 it necessary to prepare, as it were, a geological section of the 

 ground. Moreover, the Megapodes which have bred in the 

 Zoological Gardens of London, have made their mounds and 

 set their eggs within it, large ends uppermost, true to the tradi- 

 tions of their race. 



The word " nidification," which signifies the act of building 

 the nest, owing to the lack of knowledge, has become perverted 

 to mean the structure of the nest, so we are not surprised to 

 find in the article under this head, in Newton's most excellent 

 Dictionary of Birds, but few lines devoted to the subject in 

 the strict sense: in these few, moreover, we are told that " the 

 tailor-bird deliberately spins a thread, and therewith sews 

 together the edges of a pair of leaves to make a receptacle for 

 its nest ; while the fantail w^arbler, by a similar process of stitch- 

 ing — even making a knot at the end of the thread — unites as 

 a sheltering canopy above its nest the upper ends of the grass 

 stems amid which it is built." One might be inclined to ask: 

 Does this warbler really knot its threads, for if it does so, the 

 act must be regarded as truly wonderful? More cautious authors 

 fail to mention it. Men and w^omen certainly spin threads, 

 drawing and twisting them by hand or machinery, and knot 

 them for various purposes, and they do these things deliberately. 



