HINTS TO ORNITHOLOGISTS. 501 



birds. During the summer months, the barn-door fowl, whilst cropping 

 the grass and herbs, will capture with the utmost facility and avidity 

 every insect, great or small, or soft or hard, which is unfortunate 

 enough to be within its reach. The diet of the wigeon is grass. 

 Still neither the wigeon nor the barn-door fowl have bristles at the 

 beak. 



The claws of rapacious birds are pronounced to be " retractile." 

 If they are so, then the knowledge of internal anatomy would force 

 us to pronounce the claws of other tribes of birds, such as the 

 robins, the doves, the barn-door fowls, and a thousand others, to be 

 retractile. 



The soldier must spend many a day amid the roar of hostile 

 cannon, before he becomes qualified to command an army ; the car- 

 penter ought to work for years in the dockyard, ere he attempts to 

 build a line-of-battle ship ; and the schoolmaster has to pour over 

 many a scientific volume, in order to prepare himself to teach the 

 mathematics. But, somehow or other, it happens now-a-days, that 

 practical knowledge does not seem to be considered essentially 

 necessary for those who undertake to write on certain parts of 

 natural history. Thus, some there are who will offer their history 

 of birds to the public, although it can be ascertained that they have 

 never been in the country which those birds inhabit. Others again, 

 not having resided a sufficient length of time among the foreign birds 

 which they undertake to describe, are perpetually giving statements 

 at variance with the real habits of the birds. Thus the account 

 which is given us of the habits of the toucan is wrong at all points, 

 to say nothing of its tongue, &c. No man who has paid sufficient 

 attention to the woodpeckers whilst in quest of food, will allow him- 

 self to be led away with the idea that these birds " break through 

 and demolish the hardest wood." Give me the man who, after 

 minute examination, has written his account of birds in the country 

 where the birds themselves are found. Give me the man, I don't 

 care of what nation, who has published his ornithological investiga- 

 tions without having first placed them into the scientific hands of 

 those men who would fain persuade him that no work on ornithology 

 can pass safely through the fiery ordeal of modern criticism unless it 

 has previously received the polish of their own incomparable varnish. 



