78 liNSECT TRANSFORMATIONS. 



* wealth makes wit waver.' Be this as it may the 

 cuckoo, which bears a strong resemblance to a • 

 hawk when on the wing, is certain to be accom- 

 panied by a similar retinue of small birds wherever 

 it flies. In the north this is so commonly observed, 

 that the cuckoo is popularly believed to be always 

 attended by a titling or pippet (Anthus pratcnsisj 

 Bechstein), which it is further imagined, has been 

 its stepmother and nurse from tiie ^g^: this, indeed, 

 is the bird whose nest the cuckoo most frequently 

 selects to deposit the eggs, which she so strangely 

 and unnaturally abandons ; though it is more pro- 

 bable that it is not on this account, but because she ; 

 appears to be a hawk, that the pippet and other small I 

 birds persecute her. 



Linnaeus records in his ' Lachesis Lapponica,* ' 

 that at Tornea there is a meadow, or bog, full of} 

 water-hemlock (Cicuta virosd)^ which annually f 

 destroys from fifty to a hundred head of cattle. It 

 seems that they eat most of it in spring, when first 

 turned into the pasture, partly from their eagerness 

 lor fresh pasture, and partly from their long fasting 

 and greediness, the herbage being then short. Be- 

 sides, from the immersion of the hemlock under 

 water, it may not have the proper scent to deter 

 them. A similar destruction of cattle from the same 

 cause occurs in the wide meadows of Leinings *, 



* J. R., in Mag. of Nat. Hist., i. 374. 



