Mr. A. Newton on the Breeding of the Green Sandpiper. 223 
nested in old Thrushes’ nests, which information; ‘he remarks, ‘‘ I 
naturally did not believe ;”’ but he states that some years after, in 
1845, he obtained from the same man four fine eggs of a bird of this 
species, which for many years had been wont to nestle in an old 
beech tree. Still doubtful on the subject, the following spring he 
himself found a nest of the bird on a pine which had a fork about 
five-and-twenty or thirty feet high. ‘‘ Joyfully,’’ he says, ‘I climbed 
the tree, and found in that fork four eggs on a simple bed of old 
moss.”” He goes on to say that in the spring of 1853 he again ob- 
tained four eggs of the same species ; and in the spring of 1854 (the 
year he was writing) he found a nest placed in the old nest of a 
Song-Thrush, out of which the shed buds of the beech had not so 
much as been removed. There were four eggs, which were hard sat 
upon on the 25th of May. 
In the ‘ Naumannia’ for 1856 (vol. vi. p. 34), in an account of 
an excursion in Western Pomerania (‘‘Vorpommern”’), Dr. Altum 
states that Totanus ochropus returns annually to its old nesting- 
places, these being Missel-Thrushes’ nests, whose remains were 
still to be seen, often some hundred yards distant from the nearest 
pool, and their height fifteen feet or more from the ground. The 
same journal for 1857 contains a valuable series of observations on 
the birds of the same district by Herr W. Hintz, in which the 
author says (vol. vii. part 1, p. 14) that on the 6th of May, 1855, 
he found three eggs of this bird on an “ Hise”? [queere, Pyrus do- 
mestica?| in an old Dove’s nest, as he thinks, though he states it 
might have been that of a Jay. Formerly, he proceeds to remark, 
he had only observed this Sandpiper to use old nests of Turdus mu- 
sicus, excepting once, when he found some young ones, only a few 
days old, hard by a river-bank on a layer of pine-needles on an 
** Else’’-stub. 
Soon after the publication of this last piece of intelligence, appeared 
that part of Herr Badeker’s ‘ Kier der Europaischen Vogel,’ wherein 
(fol. xxx. no. 5) Helodromas ochropus was treated of, and a concise 
summary of the foregoing accounts was given. This was remarked 
upon by the writer of an article in ‘ The Ibis’ for 1859 (vol. i. p. 405), 
and thus the curious facts which I have above detailed were made 
generally known, for the first time I believe, to English readers. In 
1860 a short recapitulation of them was also published by my friend 
Dr. Baldamus, in the continuation of Naumann’s celebrated ‘ Vogel 
Deutschlands’ (vol. xiii. p. 241).. Towards the close of the same 
year also that excellent observer who veils his name under the sig- 
nature of “An Old Bushman” contributed a series of articles to 
‘The Field’ newspaper, in which he described his own experience of 
the Green Sandpiper’s way of nesting in Sweden. The natural- 
history editor of that paper, not knowing what had been already 
written, exhibited some signs of scepticism on the subject, whereupon 
his correspondent reiterated his statement, saying (Field, No. 411, 
Noy. 10, 1860, p. 393) that “there is no doubt about the matter,” 
and adding that he “‘ never took the nest on the ground.” 
I have now only to read to you a portion of a letter, dated Novem- 
