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31 
JANUARY OTH. 
ORDINARY MEETING.—MR. J. HOWELL ON THE 
NIGHTINGALE. 
The male generally arrives from eight to ten days before the female. 
This is the period when a fierce rivalship occurs among the males, each 
striving his utmost to out-sing his fellow, A dozen may be sometimes 
heard in a favourite district. The habits of this bird are solitary. Its 
local distribution is very curious, for in some countries it is numerous, 
and in others wholly unknown. It extends as far north as Sweden, and 
even Siberia, while in this island its range is no further north than an. 
isolated spot or two in Yorkshire. It is abundant in Greece, Italy, 
Spain, Portugal, and France, rare in Holland, and altogether unknown 
in the Channel Islands, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. It is rarely, if 
ever, heard upon the border line of South Wales. Its distribution in 
England is also very local. Ignoring almost everywhere the palzeozoic 
rocks, it ranges over its south-eastern part, viz. the Wealden, 
Cretaceous, and Tertiary formations of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, 
Surrey, Middlesex, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Cam- 
bridgeshire, and Essex, and even in these counties it attaches itself 
to particular places in preference to others—a problem for science to 
solve. It scarcely ever remains near the sea upon our chalk downs, a 
fact that may be accounted for by the absence of trees, as it honours 
their wooded valleys. It does not visit Cornwall or the western part 
of Devonshire, and had never been heard in Staffordshire, Derbyshire, 
Cheshire, nor Lancashire, while the extent of its northern range is 
Doncaster in Yorkshire. It is abundant in the Isles of Greece, Syria, 
and Palestine. In Africa, like Europe and Asia, its local distribution 
is very partial. It haunts sequestered shrubberies, copses situated 
in low humid valleys, rich parks, embowered coverts, outskirts of 
forests and woods, and green hedgerows bordering our waysides. It 
delights to dwell in the immediate vicinity of water, being a cleanly 
bird and extremely fond of bathing. Once having fixed upon its 
place of abode, there it remains, returning year after year to precisely 
the same spot. This love-of-home trait has been taken advantage of 
to localise it in countries to which it is a stranger. 
An attempt made by a gentleman of Swansea to introduce the 
nightingale into Wales by distributing its eggs among the nests of 
birds in that neighbourhood in the hatching season, proved a failure; 
for, though the nightingales were contented to remain in their new 
locality during the first summer, they never returned to it in subsequent 
