36 A Book of the Snipe. 



amongst the snipe, though how far Box, the 

 home-bred bird, contrives to avoid encounter- 

 ing Cox, the foreign migrant ; whether Box, 

 assuming that he does evacuate the British 

 marshes, ever returns, Hke a salmon, in 

 propria persona to breed in a remembered 

 haunt; or whether his place is taken for the 

 next breeding-season by members of the out- 

 going Cox family, who are disinclined for 

 travel, — these things are as yet beyond the 

 ken of man, though there are many men of 

 diametrically opposite opinions who are posi- 

 tive upon each and all of these points. 



Migration, the most fascinating problem in 

 all nature, is still the unsolved x of ornith- 

 ology. Something we know, something we 

 learn every day, but shall we ever know in 

 their entirety the laws which govern the 

 movements of those vast armies of birds 

 which sweep in all directions across the 

 oceans, apparently as ungoverned as the winds 

 themselves, yet each pursuing a track which 

 was perhaps adopted before man first stirred 

 in the womb of Nature ; still following to-day 



