PERISORKUS INFAUSTUS. 479 



begins to prepare its nest, and, in doing so, exercises all the cunning 

 of its tribe to keep concealed the selected spot. Its eggs are, con- 

 sequently, still unknown to most collectors, while, in some cabinets, 

 they are represented by well-picked varieties of those of the Magpie, 

 to which, indeed, they bear but slight resemblance/' 



[1857-8.] ''The nests of this bird are extremely difficult to find, 

 as I have experienced in the many blank days I have passed in 

 succession in forests where I knew it was breeding, and where the 

 snow, at night at all events, was in capital order for snow-skates. It 

 requires long familiarity with the habits of the bird to know when 

 and how to watch it to its nest, whose proximity it is so careful not 

 to betray by any observable marks of anxiety." 



[The preceding paragraphs from three of his Sale Catalogues, all that Mr, 

 WoUey ever published concerning this species, will shew that he never laid 

 claim to be thought the earliest discoverer of its eggs, yet I believe he prac- 

 tically was, as he certainly was the first to bring authenticated specimens to 

 the knowledge of naturalists. His hesitation seems to have been in part due 

 to the fact that in 1835 Prof. Nilsson (Skandinavisk Fauna, Foglarua, ed. 2, i, 

 p. 185) had pretty accurately described, though at second hand and without 

 naming his informant, the nest, and said of the eggs that they were somewhat 

 smaller than Pies', by which we may infer that he was told they resembled 

 those eggs in colour, which, roughly speaking, they to some extent do. But 

 what I imagine to have chiefly influenced Mr. Wolley's guarded language was 

 his wish to spare the feelings of his good friend Pastor Sommerfelt, who, when 

 they met at Nyborg, in East Finmark, in the summer of 1855, must have 

 mentioned the supposed nest and three eggs obtained by him from the Lapps 

 at Karasjok, in West Finmark, in 1852, as he recorded some years later (QCfvers. 

 K. Vet.-Akad. Forhandl. 1861, p. 77) ^ Now, out of mere diffidence, it was 

 the Pastor's habit to send eggs which he had not seen before to Dr. Kjosrbolling 

 at Copenhagen for determination or confirmation, and it seems to me in a very 

 high degree probable that the two eggs and part of a nest which the Doctor 

 described at the Gotha meeting of the German Ornithological Society in 

 July 1854 (Naumannia, 1854, p. 311 ; and Journ. fiir Orn. 1854, p. Lxi), as 

 being those of this bird obtained in West Finmark, must have been received 

 from Pastor Sommerfelt, and were therefore those to which his subsequently 

 published note referred. It is also pretty plain from the description given that 

 they could hardly have been those of Garrulus or Perisoreus infaustus, whatever 



> " When, on my arrival in Finmark [in 1851], I applied to the Lapps [Fijinerne] 

 to get its fi^^, all insisted that it only bred in the fir-woods. I then applied to the 

 Karasok Lapps, and thence received, in the summer of 1852, three eggs, which 

 were, however, nearly hatched out; they were taken in the first half of May. 

 Later, I have received several nests from the Tana valley which were takeu in 

 April' (Sommerfelt, ut supra). 



