190 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



The goosander makes a deep, well built, and spacious nest, 

 generally in the hole of a decayed tree. It is composed 

 almost entirely of the bird's own soft down, placed upon a 

 substratum of small chips and pieces of the decayed wood of 

 the tree in which the nest is situated. It is sometimes placed 

 on the ground under the shelter of the forking roots of trees, 

 or on a sloping bank by the margin of one of our Scottish 

 lochs. There are, however, no trees in North Uist, except 

 in garden enclosures, but Mr Gray has informed me that the 

 nest taken by Dr Dewar was among sedge, so that the bird 

 most probably adapts the situation of its nest to the locality 

 in which it breeds. 



The first Scottish nest which can be considered as indis- 

 putable was procured from the north of Perthshire, in 1871, 

 by Mr Harvie-Brown, and as the circumstances of the capture 

 may not prove uninteresting, Mr Brown has kindly allowed 

 me to transcribe the following passage from his Egg Book : 



" On the 29th July 1870 a gamekeeper in Perthshire gave 

 me the following piece of information, ex ore — * I got a nest 

 too, for the first time this year, of the dun diver. It was in 

 the hole of an old tree, and had ten eggs. I had the bird in 

 my hand.' In 1871 this keeper, with permission of the 

 lessee of the shootings, was employed by me to collect birds' 

 eggs for Captain Feilden and myself. No directions were 

 given to him regarding ducks' eggs or down, as sufficient 

 importance had not been attached to his communication of 

 July 1870. Under date of May 1871, the keeper writes: 

 ' I have some eggs which I shall be glad to send to you, if 

 you care for them. They are as follows — dun divers, etc' 

 At this time I was in Norway. The eggs were sent to 

 Dunipace unblown during my absence. They contained full- 

 grown chicks; no down was sent with them. They were 

 blown by the keeper and his son at Dunipace. One Qgg was 

 destroyed in blowing and two others were badly broken, but 

 the pieces were carefully preserved. On my return home I 

 compared these eggs with eggs of scoters and goosanders taken 

 this season (1871) in Norway, and also with a number of 

 mergansers' eggs collected by Captain Feilden and m)^self 

 in the Hebrides and Sutherland, and, after a careful examina- 



