254 Froceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



And now, we have to record first, its occurrence at 

 Gartmore in the south-west of Perthshire, in the lovely Vale of 

 Menteith, on the 15th January 1883, as proved by the specimen 

 shown to you to-night; second, a later occurrence on the 

 14th March, at a locality about seven miles further east in the 

 same Vale of Menteith ; and third, the breeding of the species 

 at the last noticed locality, and the discovery of the fact by 

 James Stirling, Esq. of Garden. The bird was sitting hard 

 on the 14th April 1883. The eggs were laid amongst a few 

 dry leaves on the otherwise bare earth of a rabbit scrape under 

 an ash-stump, and about 3 feet from the entrance of the hole. 



In conclusion, I may be allowed to point a moral. 



I think that the subject of the extension of range and the 

 increase of species is always of great interest, affecting the life 

 history in many other important matters of detail ; and 

 writers upon our own British birds, or on British Zoology, 

 would do well to pay special attention to such developments. 

 Migration is induced, and the great laws of migration are 

 actually brought into being by such increase ; if anything be 

 done to retard or check the natural outflow or extension of 

 range, distress, poverty, and death follow. 



The moral is, that it does seem strange that of all living 

 creatures, Man is the last, and the most reluctant to yield to, 

 and the slowest to realise, these facts ; and day after day, 

 year after year, he sets at defiance these great natural laws, 

 until it culminates in the state of things we at this present 

 time hear of in our own Western Isles and in Ireland. Cer- 

 tainly the only sensible, the only really efficacious way, from 

 a naturalist's point of view, of relieving districts overcrowded 

 with human life, is to open out fresh ground and to assist 

 and encourage emigration, to plant the Saxon on wider areas 

 and virgin soil, where the natural vigour of the race — long 

 dormant, whilst hopeless crowding and exhausted land had 

 sapped their energy and lowered their moral tone — would 

 quickly again reassert itself, and great good to them would 

 assuredly follow, as it has done many a time before. 



