10 BE1TISH BIRDS, THEIR EGGS AND NESTS. 



nest-finder's experience and assent : but it will not do so in any 

 other form. 



It is impossible to lay down any rule for the colours of eggs 

 in connection with the places, or nature of the places, in which 

 they are laid. White eggs are not laid in nests built in dark 

 holes as a rule indeed, very much the contrary ; witness the 

 Dove's eggs, and so many of those of the Duck tribe ; nor are 

 dark-coloured eggs invariably found to be laid where exposed 

 to the greatest amount of broad daylight. There seems to be 

 no rule in the matter. 



Again, another answer to the question just noticed is, Eggs 

 were made so beautiful, and so various in their beauty, to gratify 

 and gladden man's eye. I don't dispute the fact that the beautiful 

 shape, and the beautiful tints, and the beautiful markings do 



f ratify and gladden the human eye and human heart too. I 

 now they do, and in thousands of cases, and with a great, pure 

 pleasure. But that is a very different thing from saying that God 

 made them so for no other reason, or even for that purpose as 

 a principal reason. How many thousands of eggs, for ten that 

 are seen by man, escape all human notice whatever ! How 

 many millions upon millions in the old-world times before there 

 were men to see them, must have had their fair colours, and 

 delicate symmetry, and harmonious intermingling of hues, for 

 no purpose whatever according to this view ! No, no. Nature 

 should not be read so. God made the Beasts of the Field, and 

 the Birds of the Air, and the Fishes of the Sea, and the Insects, 

 and the Shells, and the Trees, and Herbs, and Flowers, all, as a 

 rule, wonderfully, gloriously, harmoniously beautiful, because He 

 is a God of order, and beauty, and harmony; because it would 

 have been inconsistent with His own Being, with the necessary 

 purposes of such a Being, with the declared objects of such a 

 Being in Creation, not to have made all " very good ; 3 ' and the 

 same reason which accounts for the beauty of the myriad flowers 

 " born to blush unseen, 33 for that of the innumerable shells and 

 insects of past days and the present day, for that of the glorious 

 birds of Tropic lands, is all that we want in the way ot expla- 

 nation of the symmetry and beauty of the Bird's Egg God made 

 it as well as all other things "very good. 33 



Something more to the point for the practical egg-hunter, and 

 even although he may be not very juvenile, is to recommend the 

 practice of jotting down notes of any peculiarity of either nest 

 or eggs or behaviour of parent birds, in any supposable case 

 a little unusual Such notes are always interesting, and very often 

 useful at some long subsequent period ; useful in themselves, and 

 useful too as commenting on or else illustrated by, the similar 

 memoranda of other observers. Besides, what is put down upon 



