278 VERTEBRATA. AVES. 



at length got hold of him. He proved small, but 

 very fierce, and his bite would have made a child 

 cry out. The elbow-joint of his wing being tho- 

 roughly shattered, and finding that he had no other 

 wound, I cut off the dangling limb, and put him into 

 a large cage with a common Lark. The wound did 

 not in the least diminish his activity, nor yet his 

 pugnacity, for he instantly began to investigate all 

 means of escape ; he tried the bores, then tapped 

 the wood-work of the cage, and produced a knocking 

 sound which made the room re-echo ; but after finding 

 his efforts vain, he then turned upon the Lark, ran 

 under him with his gaping beak to bite, and effec- 

 tually alarmed his far more gentle and elegant an- 

 tagonist. Compelled to separate them, the Nut- 

 hatch, (for this bird I discovered him to be, by turn- 

 ing over the leaves of an Ornithologia,) was put into 

 a smaller cage of plain oak wood and wire. Here he 

 remained all night ; and the next morning his knock- 

 ing or tapping with his beak was the first sound I 

 heard, though sleeping in an apartment divided from 

 the other by a landing-place. He had food given 

 to him, minced chicken and bread-crumbs and water. 

 He ate and drank with a most perfect impudence, 

 and the moment he had satisfied himself, turned again 

 to his work of battering the frame of his cage, the 

 sound from which, both in loudness and prolonga- 

 tion of noise, is only to be compared to the efforts 

 of a fashionable footman upon a fashionable door, 

 in a fashionable square. He had a particular fancy 

 for the extremities of the corner pillars of his cage ; 



