226 EXTERMINATION 
more recent writers refer it as Latham did to the Scolopacidzx. Its 
rediscovery, should it still survive, would therefore be of some 
interest, and it is just possible that the localities for it are 
erroneously given. 
From birds which have recently become altogether extinct we 
naturally turn to those that have of late been exterminated in 
certain countries though still surviving elsewhere. Several such 
instances are furnished by the British Islands. First there is the 
CRANE which in Turner’s time (1544) was described as breeding in 
our fens. Then the SPoONBILL, said by Sir Thomas Browne 
(1688) to breed in Suffolk, as it formerly had done in Norfolk and 
shewn by Mr. Harting (Zoologist, 1877, p. 425 ; 1886, p. 811) to have 
anciently had breeding-stations in Sussex and in Middlesex. The 
CAPERCALLY, we know to have frequented the indigenous pine- 
forests of Ireland and Scotland. In the former it had most likely 
become extinct soon after 1760, and in the latter not much later. 
Not a single specimen of the British stock of this bird is known 
to exist in any museum, but the species has been successfully 
introduced from Sweden into Scotland during the last forty years, 
and is now certainly increasing in numbers. ‘The BuSTARD, which 
once tenanted the downs and open country of England from Dorset 
to the East Riding of Yorkshire, vanished from Norfolk, its last 
stronghold as a British Bird, in 1838. “From other counties it had 
before disappeared. It is worthy of note that three of the four 
species just mentioned were protected to a certain degree by Acts 
of Parliament, but these laws only gave immunity to their eggs 
and none to the parent-birds during the breeding-season, thus 
shewing how futile is protection to the former when compared with 
the safety of the latter, since there are very many species whose 
nests from time out of mind have been and are yearly pillaged 
without any disastrous consequences arising from the practice.! 
It would be impossible here to name the many Birds which, 
once numerous in the British Islands, have now so much 
diminished as to be rightly considered scarce, or to recount the 
various causes to which their diminution is due. The persecution 
of Birds-of-Prey seems to have begun with the keepers of poultry, 
to whom the Kits, and the Hen-HArRRtkr, Circus cyaneus, were a 
sore trouble,’ but it has been actively followed up by game- 
1 The singular wisdom of the old command (Deut. xxii. 6)—the most ancient 
‘‘game-law”’ (using the term in its widest sense) in existence—has here a 
curious exemplification. 
* Schaschek, a Bohemian who visited England about 1461, says he had 
nowhere seen so many Kites as around London Bridge (Bibl. Lit. Ver. Stuttgart, 
vii. p. 40). And the statement is confirmed by Belon, who in the later editions 
of his Observationes (book ii. chap, xxxvi. note) says that they were scarcely 
more numerous in Cairo than in London, feeding on the garbage of the streets 
