enquiring about Cixc/us of any of your country friends, and can’t 
make them understand by one name, try another. 
Those who have only an acquaintance with the Dipper 
through the medium of a stuffed specimen and a glass case, can 
have no idea of the energetic and interesting little fellow he is in 
his native streams ; and many happy hours have I spent in 
listening to his sweet and merry warble, or watching him busily 
seeking his dinner at the bottom of some shallow stream. For a 
rare fisher is Czmc/us, and we are afraid that our fresh-water snails, 
the larvee of the Ephemera or water-flies, and water-beetles, have a 
hard time of it when he is about. 
The question of his poaching on salmon ova has, we think, 
been entirely settled in his favour; and my own observations have 
always tended to prove that his food consisted of molluscs, the 
larvze of water-flies, etc. Mr. Frank Buckland, among others, says 
this is so, and that ‘‘it is as foolish to shoot a swallow skimming 
_ over a turnip field, as a Water Crow on a salmon bed.” This is 
strong evidence from one who, we are afraid, would have little 
mercy on salmon poachers in any form. The late J. K. Lord, a 
well known naturalist, also gives the following evidence in his 
_ favor. ‘Believe me, it is not with any felonious intent that the Dipper 
visits the spawning beds. He would not give a chirp to breakfast 
_ on the daintiest fish eggs that speckled trout or silver salmon ever 
laid. Fat larve, plump and savoury water beetles, and delicate 
young fresh water molluscs, are his delight; and he knows well 
the weakness such robbers have for new laid eggs, and like a 
sensible bird, goes where the eggs are, to find the robbers—an 
_ obedience to instinct that often costs him his life. I have opened 
_ the stomachs of dozens of Dippers when collecting for the purposes 
of Natural history, and never in a single instance did I discover 
_ other than the remains of insects and fresh-water shells.” Again, 
at a meeting of the Zoological Society in February, in 1863, the 
_ Water Ouzel was fairly put upon his trial as a destroyer of fish- 
spawn. The first verdict was “Not proven.” This being in the 
- form of a Scotch verdict, an English Water Ouzel was entitled to 
enter a demurrer, I am, therefore, not surprised to learn that a 
i 
