NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 261 



It has been remarked that every species of bird has 

 a mode of nidification peculiar to itself, so that a schoolboy 

 would at once pronounce on the sort of nest before him. 

 This is the case among fields and woods and wilds ; but in 

 the villages round London, where mosses and gossamer, and 

 cotton from vegetables, are hardly to be found, the nest of 

 the chaffinch has not that elegant finished appearance, nor 

 is it so beautifully studded with lichens, as in a more rural 

 district ; and the wren is obliged to construct its house with 

 straws and dry grasses, which do not give it that rotundity 

 and compactness so remarkable in the edifices of that little 

 architect. Again, the regular nest of the house-martin 

 is hemispheric; but where a rafter, or a joist, or a cornice 

 may happen to stand in the way, the nest is so contrived as 

 to conform to the obstruction, and becomes flat, or 

 compressed. 



In the following instances instinct is perfectly uniform 

 and consistent. There are three creatures, the squirrel, the 

 field-mouse, and the bird called the nut-hatch {Sitta 

 Europcea\ which live much on hazel-nut; and yet they 

 open them each in a different way. The first, after rasping 

 off" the small end, splits the shell in two with his long fore- 

 teeth, as a man does with his knife ; the second nibbles 

 a hole with his teeth, so regular as if drilled with a wimble, 

 and yet so small that one could wonder how the kernel 

 can be extracted through it; while the last picks an 

 irregular ragged hole with its bill : but as this artist has no 

 paws to hold the nut firm while he pierces it, like an adroit 

 workman, he fixes it, as it were in a vice, in some cleft of a 

 tree, or in some crevice ; when, standing over it, he per- 

 forates the stubborn shell. We have often placed nuts in 

 the chink of a gate-post where nut-hatches have been known 

 to haunt, and have always found that those birds have readily 



