THE INDIAN ROBIN 65 



a brown back, and a black back to his southern cousin, 

 they are not entitled to dictate to us. The Darwin- 

 Wallace hypothesis has been of great service to Science 

 during the past fifty years, but zoology has now out- 

 grown it, and sooner or later all scientific men must 

 recognise this fact. But we have made a long di- 

 gression into the arid field of science, let us hie back 

 to our Indian robins. 



Perhaps their most interesting characteristic is 

 their fondness for queer nesting sites. There is nothing 

 particularly remarkable about the nest itself, which 

 varies according to its situation, from a mere pad 

 to a neat cup composed of soft materials, such as 

 cotton, grass, and vegetable fibres. The nursery is 

 cosily lined, frequently with feathers. The lining 

 almost invariably contains some human or horse 

 hair, and often fragments of snake's skin. In April 

 and May of one year I came upon the following robins' 

 nests at Lahore : No. i, in the disused nest of a rat- 

 bird {Argya caudata) placed about five feet above the 

 ground in a thorny but dense bush ; No. 2, on the 

 outer sill of a window, which was guarded by trellis- 

 work, the meshes of which were so fine that it was 

 with difficulty that I could insert two fingers into the 

 nest ; No. 3, in a hole in the mud wall of a deserted 

 hut ; No. 4, among the roots of a sago palm tree ; 

 No. 5, in a very dilapidated disused rat-bird's nest ; 

 No. 6, in a hole in a railway embankment ; No. 7, 

 in a hole barely a foot from the ground in the 

 trunk of a tree — in the same hole was a wasps' nest ; 

 No. 8, in one of the spaces between bricks that had 



