wading, pick out the aurelias of the genus of PJiry- 

 ganece, &c.* 



Hedge-sparrows frequent sinks and gutters in 

 hard weather, where they pick up crumbs and other 

 sweepings : and in mild weather they procure worms, 

 which are stirring every month in the year, as any 

 one may see that will only be at the trouble of taking 

 a candle to a grass-plot on any mild winter's night. 

 Redbreasts and wrens in the winter haunt out-houses, 

 stables, and barns, where they find spiders and flies 

 that have laid themselves up during the cold season. 

 But the grand support of the soft-billed birds in win- 

 ter is that infinite profusion of aurelice of the Lepidop- 

 tera ordo, which is fastened to the twigs of trees and 

 their trunks, to the pales and walls of gardens and 

 buildings, and is found in every cranny and cleft of 

 rock or rubbish, and even in the ground itself. 



Every species of titmouse winters with us ; they 

 have what I call a kind of intermediate bill between 

 the hard and the soft, between the Linnsean genera 

 of Fringilla and Motacilla. One species alone spends 

 its whole time in the woods and fields, never retreat- 

 ing for succour, in the severest seasons, to houses 

 and neighbourhoods ; and that is the delicate long- 

 tailed titmouse, which is almost as minute as the 

 golden-crowned wren : but the blue titmouse, or nun 

 {Parus ccEruleus), the cole-mouse {Pariis ater), the great 



* Derham's " Physico Theology." 

 29 



