INTRODUCTORY CHAPTERS,. 



CHAPTEE I. 



THE object with which this book is written is that it may be 

 interesting and useful to young eg^-collectors. It is not easy to 

 make a book, which is to be devoted to sucli details as the length 

 and breadth and shades and markings of some two or three 

 hundred different eggs, either interesting, or even barely read- 

 able. But there is no necessity that a book of British birds' 

 nests and eggs should be devoted to merely such details as 

 those. For my own part, 1 do not find it easy altogether to 

 dissociate the eggs laid from the bird which lays them ; and 

 when I see a oeautiful nest, 1 can hardly help being led to 

 think something about the builder, its means, objects, powers, 

 instincts and intelligence. And 1 don't see why a book about 

 nests and eggs should not follow the direction given by those 

 same objects to my thoughts, and the thoughts of hundreds 

 and thousands of other men besides me, and I am sure too of 

 hundreds and thousands of boys and girls as well. I am as sure 

 as if I could see into the minds of many and many a young 

 nest-hunter, that when he finds one day the wonderfully neat and 

 beautiful Chaffinch's or Goldfinch's" or Crested-wren's nest, 

 and the next, lights upon some littering Jackdaw's nest^ or 

 inartistic, careless-seeming Jay's or Ringdove's, that the wide, 

 wonderful contrast and difference sets him thinking What is 

 the reason of this strange dissimilarity ? Is one of these birds 

 really less clever than the other ? Did God make one of them 

 a careless, disorderly, unthrifty bird, while the other He made 

 sucn a wonderfully neat and dexterous and contriving one ? 



And I am equally sure that a little measure of observation 

 and thought will be enough to show the young mqmrei not 

 only that the Great Maker of Birds and Giver of their instincts 



B 



