BRITISH BIRDS AND BIRD LOVERS. 173 



are seen hobbling into their tombs, as if driven thither by a 

 flock of fears, and crouching under a remorse that disturbs 

 instinct, even as if it were conscience. So sings and says the 

 Celtic superstition, muttered to us in a dream adding that 

 there are raven-ghosts, great black bundles of feathers, for ever 

 in the forests, night-hunting in famine for prey, emitting a last 

 feeble croak at the blush of the dawn, and then all at once 

 invisible." * Poetry here thrusts science to the wall. 



Contrast this striking but fanciful description with the matter- 

 of-fact, careful, and precise observations of Waterton. Even in 

 the case of so common a bird as the chaffinch, he takes nothing 

 for granted, and displays the accurate eye and suggestive habits 

 of thought of the true naturalist : " I seethe chaffinch at almost 

 every step. He is in the fruit and forest trees, and also in the 

 lowly hawthorn ; he is on the housetop, and on the ground 

 close to your feet. You may observe him on the stack-bar and 

 on the dunghill ; on the king's highway, in the fallow field, in 

 the meadow, in the pasture, and by the margin of the stream. 

 His nest is a paragon of perfection. He attaches lichens to 

 the outside of it by means of the spider's slender web. In the 

 year 1805, when I was on a plantation in Guiana, I saw the 

 humming-bird making use of the spider's web in its nidification, 

 and then the thought struck me that our chaffinch might pro- 

 bably make use of it too. On my return to Europe, I watched 

 a chaffinch busy at its nest ; it left it and flew to an old wall, 

 took a cobweb from it, then conveyed it to its nest and inter- 

 wove it with the lichen on the outside of it. ... Like all its 

 congeners, it never covers its eggs on retiring from its nest, for 

 its young are hatched blind. The chaffinch never sings when 

 on the wing, but it warbles incessantly on the trees and on the 

 hedgerows, from the early part of February to the second week 

 in July."f Every one is familiar with the chaffinch, and yet 



* Recreations, vol. ii. p. 151. (Ed. 1868.) 



t Essays on Natural History. First Series, 6th Ed. p. 280. 



