516 LETTER TO WILLIAM SWAINSON, ESQ. 



never bring my mind to give to the public a general history of the 

 Demerara birds. 



You might have spared yourself the lamentation, that Demerara 

 has only been visited by amateurs, " whose sole object seems to have 

 been that of procuring perfect skins," had you but called to your 

 recollection the contents of one of your former letters to me. I had 

 sent you some pages, replete with notices, on the habits of birds in 

 Demerara. For this you returned me abundant thanks ; and having 

 highly complimented me on the extent of my ornithological know- 

 ledge, you begged hard for a fresh supply ; adding at the time, that 

 I should thus be of the utmost service to you, as you had a project 

 in your head of writing the history of the Demerara birds. 



Knowing that you had never been in that country, this piece of 

 information so astounded me, and appeared to me so presumptuous 

 withal, that I began to think it was high time to drop the corre- 

 spondence. 



By the way, when you and I did correspond, that was the proper 

 time for you to have informed me that my solution of corrosive sub- 

 limate in alcohol had failed,* and then I would have gently pointed 

 out to you the error into which you had fallen. But after I had im- 

 parted the discovery to you in so liberal and so friendly a manner, say, 

 was it generous in you to have sealed up the supposed evidence of 

 its failure in your vinegar-bottle, to be squirted at me, on some future 

 day, through the medium of the doctor's Cyclopaedia ? 



Your theory on parts of the plumage of birds is very unsound. 



* " I made the following experiment with Mr Waterton's composition when in 

 Brazil. The ants which swarmed in a room I inhabited at Pernambuco had com- 

 mitted great devastation amongst the prepared insects and birds. Whilst pre- 

 serving one of the latter, I cut off a piece of the flesh, and, after saturating it with 

 the composition, laid it on the path which led to one of their holes. The little 

 creatures seemed at first to be somewhat suspicious of its wholesomeness; but 

 after walking about and upon it, and examining it with their antennae, they 

 seemed to pronounce a favourable verdict ; for one and all began dragging it away 

 to the entrance of their nest, where it soon disappeared beneath the earthen floor. 

 The experiment was repeated three times, and the same result followed. The 

 mixture had been brought from England, and I had no reason to believe that it 

 was defective in the preparation," &c. See Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia, 

 Natural History of Birds," by W. Swainson, Esq., vol. i. 



