148 NATURAL HISTORY 



that a soft-billed bird should subsist on the same food with 

 the hard-billed, for the former have thin membranaceous 

 stomachs suited to their soft food; while the latter, the 

 granivorous tribe, have strong muscular gizzards which, like 

 mills, grind, by the help of small gravels and pebbles, what 

 is swallowed. This proceeding of the cuckoo, of dropping 

 its eggs as it were by chance, is such a monstrous outrage 

 on maternal affection, one of the first great dictates of 

 nature, and such a violence on instinct that, had it only been 

 related of a bird in the Brazils or Peru, it would never have 

 merited our belief. But yet, should it farther appear that 

 this simple bird, when divested of that natural crapyy that 

 seems to raise the kind in general above themselves, and 

 inspire them with extraordinary degrees of cunning and 

 address, may be still endued with a more enlarged faculty 

 of discerning what species are suitable and congenerous 

 nursing-mothers for its disregarded eggs and young, and 

 may deposit them only under their care, this would be 

 adding wonder to wonder, and instancing in a fresh manner 

 that the methods of Providence are not subjected to any 

 mode or rule, but astonish us in new lights, and in various 

 and changeable appearances. 1 



of thirty -seven European species of birds in whose nests the egg of tlie 

 cuckoo has been found more or less frequently, and to this list the editor 

 of " The Ibis " was able to add fifteen others. On different authority, 

 another list of twenty -two species is given in " The Birds of Middle- 

 sex," p. 120. ED. 



1 Since the above remarks were written by Gilbert White, so many 

 extraordinary facts in relation to the habits of the cuckoo have been 

 brought to light, mainly through the researches of modern ornithologists, 

 that it would be impossible within the compass of a foot-note to men- 

 tion half of them. 



Commencing with the observations of Dr. Jenner (Phil. Trans 

 vol. Ixxviii. p. 225), the reader may be referred to what has been pub- 

 lished by Col. Montagu (On. Diet. Introd.), Mr. Blackwall (Man- 

 chester Memoirs, 2nd series), Mr. Durham Weir (Macgillivray's Hist. 

 Brii. Birds, vol. iii. p. 128), Dr. Baldamus (Naumannia, 1853, pp. 307- 

 326), a very remarkable paper translated and epitomized by the Rev. 

 A. C. Smith and Mr. George Dawson Rowley respectively in the 

 "Zoologist," 1868, pp. 1145-1166, and "The Ibis," 1865, p. 178; 

 Herr Adolf Muller, in " Der Zoologische Garten," for Oct. 1868; 



