BRITISH BIRDS AND BIRD LOVERS. 185 



Taking these from the drawers in which they repose, in an 

 atmosphere fatal to moths and insect ravagers of all kinds, owl 

 and hawk peacefully resting next the soft-billed birds on which 

 during life they preyed, the enthusiast lovingly smooths each 

 feathered ghost, and lays it softly down in the limbo of winged 

 creatures which once trilled and screamed and called and 

 swooped and dived and hovered over many a mountain and 

 many a well-watered woodland. In such wise might Aristotle 

 have sat musing over the specimens his royal pupil sent him 

 from India, or Pliny balanced the evidence for and against the 

 credibility of Apicius's dogma that the daintiest morsel of a 

 flamingo is its tongue. Draw near and desire speech with the 

 owner of this charming room. He either speculates on the 

 higher problems of his science whereof we have spoken, or he 

 is at work upon some curious fact in the economy of his 

 favourites. Why, for instance, in nine cases out of ten, is a 

 piece of serpent's skin* placed loosely at the bottom of the 

 rufous warbler's nest in Algeria, a species of which two speci- 

 mens have recently been obtained in Great Britain ? or what 

 impulse in certain years brings certain species of birds to well- 

 defined portions of Great Britain, as, for example, why in the 

 autumns of 1866 and 1869 were there extraordinary arrivals of 

 grey phalaropes along the south-east and southern coasts ? On 

 such questions he will enlarge with avidity, perhaps at too great 

 length for perfect sympathy, if his companion be not bitten 

 with the ornithological mania. But this is only the amiable 

 failing of all enthusiasts, and the victim can always remember 

 betimes the warning of the Sabellian sibyl, 



" Ilunc neque dira venena nee hosticus auferet ensis 

 Nee laterum dolor aut tussis nee tarda podagra ; 

 Garrulus hunc quando consumet cunque ; loquaces, 

 Si sapiat, vitet." 



* See the singular reason brought forward in Professor Newton's Yarrell, 

 I. p. 358- 



