OF SELBORNE. 373 



little architect 1 . Again, the regular nest of the house 

 martin is hemispheric; but where a rafter, or a joist, or 

 a cornice, may happen to stand in the way, the nest 

 is so contrived as to conform to the obstruction, and 

 becomes flat or oval or compressed. 



In the following instances instinct is perfectly uniform 

 and consistent. There are three creatures, the squirrel, 

 the field-mouse, and the bird called the nuthatch (Sitta 

 Europaa), which live much on hazel-nuts ; and yet they 

 open them each in a different way. The first, after 

 rasping off the small end, splits the shell in two with 

 his long fore teeth, as a man does with his knife ; the 

 second nibbles a hole with his teeth, so regular as if 

 drilled with a wimble, and yet so small that one would 

 wonder how the kernel can be extracted through it ; 

 while the last picks an irregular ragged hole with its 

 bill: but as this artist has no paws to hold the nut 

 firm while he pierces it, like an adroit workman, he 

 fixes it, as it were, in a vice, in some cleft of a tree, or 

 in some crevice ; when, standing over it, he perforates 

 the stubborn shell. We have often placed nuts in the 

 chink of a gate-post where nuthatches have been known 

 to haunt, and have always found that those birds have 

 readily penetrated them. While at work they make a 



1 It would appear that there is in this case a kind of free agency, if the 

 term may be allowed, on the part of the bird ; or at least an instinctive 

 adaptation to circumstances and locality. I have a wren's nest, which I 

 took in the farm yard at Malthouse, near Hartley, Hants. A corner of 

 the thatch of the pigsty was broken off, and the little architect constructed 

 its nest so perfectly to resemble, and make good the corner of the thatch, 

 that it was really difficult to distinguish the one from the other. The 

 opening was in the inside under the thatch. It was not obliged, in that 

 district, to construct its nest of straws for want of moss. 



It seems to me that the use of bright and fresh materials in the rural 

 districts, and of those of a different or more sombre description in the 

 metropolitan, is to answer the same purpose to elude observation. The 

 nests brought to me by boys from the Hampstead fields, possess every 

 character of those sent from Hampshire, with the exception that the 

 Hampshire specimens are brighter. The whitethroat's nest from Hamp- 

 shire, and that taken in the Marylebone fields, were both alike con- 

 structed of the dried stalks of Galium Aparine. G. D. 



