NOTE 



IN my last eight or nine long vacations I have 

 occasionally found time to write a lecture for a 

 Natural History Society, or a paper for Macmillan's 

 Magazine. The present volume I doubt if I can 

 justly call it a book consists of a selection of these 

 lectures and papers. Most of them have been in 

 print before, but where it seemed advisable I have 

 altered and to some extent rewritten them. All 

 were written in the leisure of summer days (counting 

 September as a summer month), with the exception 

 of the first, which I have prefixed as a kind of 

 prologue to the rest. I should add that Chapter 

 IV. was published last December in the form of a 

 pamphlet by my friend Mr. Blackwell of Oxford. 



Chapter X. has to do neither with birds nor 

 books. But the subject of that little memoir was all 



