MAY 103 



house a most majestic object in its sombre robe dyed, 

 as it were, in burgundy. The variety is said to have been 

 derived in the eighteenth century from a parent tree, 

 still living in a Thuringian forest near Sonderhausen. 

 But Dr. Augustine Henry tells us, in the great work, 

 quoted above, which he is preparing in collaboration 

 with Mr. H. J. Elwes, that so long ago as 1680 mention 

 is made of three beeches with red leaves growing on the 

 Stammberg in Zurichgau. These trees were popularly 

 believed to have grown up on a spot where five 

 brothers fought each other, and three of them were slain. 

 Those who wish to plant the purple beech should see 

 that they are not supplied with copper beeches. 



XXIII 



In round numbers, there are four hundred dis- 

 tinct species of British birds, whereof Dr. Ed- London 

 ward Hamilton, eight-and-twenty years ago, Birds 

 enumerated nearly one hundred as Londoners, resident 

 or casual, in a list which he published in the Zoologist. 

 But his census was a liberal one, taking account of such 

 chance passengers as the falcons and hawks, which 

 sometimes alight on the golden cross of St. Paul's. I 

 do not remember whether he included the kite, once so 

 abundant on the tidal shores of the Thames as to ex- 

 cite the wonder of observant foreigners in the fifteenth 

 and sixteenth centuries, but now so nearly extinct in 

 Britain that probably not one in 500,000 of the present 

 generation has ever seen a kite's superb display of wing- 

 manship. I have already recorded, not without exulta- 

 tion, that on a certain May morning in 1905 a kite was 



