MIGRATION. 787 



have been familiar with the habits of the birds of passage from the 

 dawn of history; but most of the best literature on the subject is 

 by northern ornithologists, and the home of the writer has had and 

 still has great influence on opinion as to the meaning and origin of 

 the migratory habit. Scandinavians and Saxons and Anglo-Saxons 

 are home-loving folk, who, in all their wanderings through this world 

 of care, keep a warm affection for the fatherland. 



A learned professor in the University of Upsala once wrote a 

 book to prove that the garden of Eden was in Sweden, by the simple 

 argument that no one who knows the delights of that blessed country 

 can believe paradise could have been anywhere else. He showed 

 that the Atlantis of Plato, the country of the hyperboreans, the 

 garden of the Hesperides, the Fortunate Islands, and the Elysian 

 Fields are but faint and imperfect reminiscences of the lovely and 

 favored climes of Sweden, from which the Greeks themselves derived 

 their alphabet, their astronomy, and their religion. 



To men of the north, home seems the natural refuge of the birds, 

 and, as much of the literature of migration is northern, the birth- 

 places of common birds have been regarded as^their true or natural 

 homes, and while their disappearance in winter has seemed to call 

 for explanation, their return in summer has been looked at as a 

 matter of course, for the intense love of home which many birds 

 have has seemed enough to draw them back as soon as winter is over. 

 It is the " homing " instinct which makes the carrier pigeon so useful 

 to man; and one of the most impressive features of the migratory 

 habit is the definiteness of the journey northward, which often ends 

 in a particular bush or ledge of rocks. Many of our common birds 

 lay their eggs year after year in the same nest, although they spend 

 part of the year in the heart of a foreign country thousands of miles 

 away, and although the surroundings of the chosen spot may have 

 changed so much that it is no longer a judicious selection. A bottle 

 in the branches of a tree at Oxbridge, in England, is known to have 

 been occupied every year, with only one exception, since 1785, by a 

 pair of blue titmice; and on a hill in Finland, well known to tourists 

 as the most northern point in Europe where the sun can be seen at 

 midnight, a nest is said to have been occupied by a pair of peregrine 

 falcons every year since 1736. Many like cases are recorded, and 

 while it is not probable that the birds which visit a nest year after 

 year for centuries are the same, the fact is all the more remarkable 

 if they belong to successive generations. 



According to folklore, some of the summer birds hide near home 

 through the winter, and Carus, in his History of Zoology, refers to 

 several learned writers who, early in the seventeenth century, quoted 

 from the older literature much venerable authority for the belief 



