Mr. NuttalVs View. 231 



to it) and to recognise and acknowledge that he had 

 for once been too slow, and moved all too like that 

 wonderful young podicipes flitviatilis, which he so 

 aptly celebrated in Zoologist, 1889, p. 577. Mr. Dar- 

 win and Professor Newton are here, at all events, at 

 loggerheads ; they diametrically oppose each other, 

 and, once again, to quote Artemus, " you pays your 

 money and you takes your choice." The Professor's 

 difference is not with me, but with Darwin : let the 

 two sides fight it out. 



Had Professor Newton, when he revised the article, 

 cuckoo, for the Dictionary of Birds, come across 

 none of the late facts on which Mr. G. T. Gentry 

 — • one of the latest and most reliable writers on 

 American ornithology — based, when he made this 

 record : 



" Mr. Nuttall," he writes, " has recorded the find- 

 ing of the cuckoo's egg in the nest of a cat-bird, 

 and another as late as the 13th of July in a robin's 

 nest. These were considered at first as rare, if not 

 incredible, instances ; but, latterly, we have had 

 several well-authenticated cases of such parasitism. 

 These observations, coupled with others equally im- 

 portant, which have been recorded, tend to show a 

 close relationship between our American cuckoos and 

 their not very distant European brother.'" ■'- 



Professor Alfred Newton well observes the motto : 

 Festina lente. In 1877 the utterance was pardonable ; 

 but here we have, in 1893, close alongside each other, 

 the two statements that the evidence is only nearly 

 enough to clear the two American cuckoos, and that 



* Italics are mine. Nests and Eggs of American Birds, p. 270, 

 ed. 18S2. 



