528 AMPELID.E. 



near Naples. There is no reason to believe that it ever 

 crosses the Mediterranean nor any record of its appearance in 

 the Iberian or Greek peninsulas, but it has been obtained 

 near Constantinople and seems almost yearly to visit the 

 Crimea. Further eastward its southern limits cannot be 

 given. None of the Indian naturalists have observed it, but 

 it is a winter visitor to some parts at least of China, and it 

 has also been recorded from Japan. Our Waxwing further 

 inhabits a large portion of North America, in winter extend- 

 ing along the Rocky Mountains and the plains as far south, 

 according to Dr. Coues, as lat. 35. At the head of the 

 Powder river in Nebraska, Mr. Drexler says he saw "millions" 

 of birds of this species every tree for miles being filled with 

 them. It is a regular visitor to the shores of Lakes Michigan 

 and Erie, but further to the east it is rarely seen along the 

 United States border, though it roves occasionally as far as 

 New England and even Nova Scotia. 



It were needless here to repeat the statements and surmises 

 of former writers as to the nidification of this bird. Nearly 

 all such have been more or less wide of the mark.* The very 

 plain statement communicated by Wolley to the Zoological 

 Society, 24th March, 1857, proved them to be fables and set 

 them at rest for ever. In years gone by Richardson, one of 

 the heroes of Arctic enterprise, failed to ascertain any facts of 

 its breeding in the Fur-countries of the North-West, and, 

 more recently, Dr. von Middendorff, the intrepid Siberian 

 traveller, was equally unsuccessful in the North-East. Yet it 

 may be safely said that there was no bird for whose egg 

 oologists throughout the world more longed. Various were the 



* Linnaeus said of it, " nidificat in Alpibus'\ which was some approach to the 

 truth, for he did not mean the Alps as commonly understood, but the mountains 

 of Scandinavia in which sense he often uses the word " Afyes." That untrust- 

 worthy compiler, J. F. Gmelin, mistaking Strahlenberg's assertion to Frisch, said 

 " nidus inrupium antris ", and the statement has been repeated in a work on 

 British ornithology printed only a few years ago. Pennant in his later writings 

 was more correct than most men of his time. Informed probably by his Scan- 

 dinavian correspondents, he says that the birds retire to the forests of the Arctic 

 Circle to breed. Most people thought the home of the species was in Central 

 Asia, "whence," to use Bonaparte's phrase, "like the Tartars in former times, 

 they make their irregular excursions/' 



