252 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



mouth like enormous tusks more or less irregularly 

 curved. We once found the skeleton of a rabbit's 

 head, in the upper jaw of which was an incisor that 

 had grown so long and with such a sharp curve, that 

 it might easily have been worn on the finger as a ring, 

 and a squirrel was some years since shot in the shrub- 

 bery at Uppark with two of its incisors, one in each 

 jaw, so curiously produced, that the person who picked 

 it up was for a moment under the impression that 

 worms were issuing from its mouth. Notwithstanding 

 the great inconvenience which this animal must for a 

 long time have experienced from the apparently utter 

 uselessness of these most important instruments, with 

 any but the most succulent food, its unusual weight, 

 size and accumulation of fat, afforded good presump- 

 tive evidence of the efficiency of its grinders. 



CHAPTER II. 

 BIRDS. 



OUR list of birds is longer, but does not include any 

 rare species among those permanently resident with 

 us. We take them in the order and with the no- 

 menclature adopted by MacGillivray, in his Manuals 

 of British Ornithology, published in 1840. The com- 

 mon Buzzard (Buteo fuscus) visits us occasionally, and 

 in the summer of 1860, nested in one of the high fir 

 trees in the park, one of the parent birds and two of 

 the young ones having forfeited their lives in the rash 

 attempt to do their appointed work within gunshot of 



