Reminiscences. 175 



think tlie W'ikleniess a\-iary, unless it is of the truly Eastern 

 type. i.e. with not a tree tor miles, is best left to those with a 

 san.i^uine disposition, stroni.ily developed amnesia, and a long 

 pocket. Please don't misunderstand me; some cover, ample 

 cover is almost indispensable to breeding Success, but let there 

 not be an cuibarros dc richcsscs. I believe aviculture is still in 

 its infancy, and that an immense amount of work still remains 

 to be done. The difificulty is that few aviculturists keep an 

 accurate record of their purchases, their breeding results, their 

 acquisitions and their losses. If such a record is kept, it is not 

 committed to writing at the time. If only aviculturists would 

 follow Polonius' advice to his son. viz : 

 " To thine own self be true, 

 And it must follow, as the night the day, 

 Thou canst not then be false to any man," 

 what real progress we should make ! But they are not. They 

 are moral cowards, and don't like to confess they lost a pair of 

 ten-guinea birds — especially to their wives, whose yearnings are 

 all in the direction of having the drawing room re-papered, or 

 possibly a new hat. And so the same old deception goes on, 

 which only benefits the dealers, and builds up false hopes "'n 

 beginners. 



And tlius, wliat the gods intended should be an aviary, 

 that should prove the envy of men, turned out to be a very 

 partial success. In the early days, before the cover had grown 

 well and converted a flight into an avian Hampton Court maze, 

 birds did well enough there, but latterly, losses became increas- 

 ingly numerous and disappointing, and breeding successes 

 decreased pari passu. This. I am aware, reads like gross 

 heresy, but so did Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the 

 blood. In this article are shown two illustrations, No. i shows 

 the flights 20 feet by 10, and No. II, 20 feet by 20 feet. In No. 



I. the birds enjoyed the space, and one could see them. In No. 



II. owing to the tremendous growth of cover the birds did not 

 seem nearly as happy; one never saw them, and breeding results 

 got less and less as time went on. But is not this just what one 

 finds in nature? You don't find birds in a dense thicket, but 

 rather in the outskirts of woods. As an old entomologist it 

 was the outskirts one beat for both larvae and the imagines of 



