3434 The Zoologist — March, 1873. 



ornithologists, in regard to the above-named theory, partly to an 

 indolent reluctance to embark on a subject which, to be rightly 

 investigated, would require a great deal of careful pains-taking, 

 and very persevering diligence, and partly to the (as I venture to 

 think) unworthy sneers with which some would-be leaders in the 

 Ornithological world tried to annihilate the learned German 

 Doctor, and my humble self also, his mere introducer; but 

 inasmuch as ridicule is not argument, and no champion arose to 

 account for the facts and combat the inferences of Dr. Baldamus, 

 raethought a well-known maxim of the English law-courts was not 

 irrelevant, — " When the counsel for the defence sees his case is 

 bad, let him abuse the plaintiff's attorney." Hence my share in 

 the obloquy so freely poured forth on this question in certain 

 quarters. 



However, so far as simple ridicule went, that would have been 

 quite harmless, had it not been accompanied, doubtless from pure 

 pleasantry, with an ingenious perversion of the theory; and it was 

 certainly easy, and perhaps exceedingly witty, to say that Dr. 

 Baldamus asserted the cuckoo to have the power of laying her egg 

 of just what colour she pleased; only such pleasantry becomes 

 mischievous in a scientific subject, inasmuch as it exactly contra- 

 dicted the Doctor's expressed view. I am not about to repeat the 

 argument, for which 1 would refer to the translation alluded to 

 above, or still better to the original ;* I will here, and to avoid 

 misapprehension, merely quote the summary of Dr. Baldamus's 

 view of the question, as he puts it; for having "set forth as a law 

 of Nature that the eggs of the cuckoo are, in a very considerable 

 degree, coloured and marked like the eggs of those birds in whose 

 nests they are about to be laid, in order that they might the less 

 easily be recognized by the foster-parents as subsiituted ones," he 

 goes on to declare his opinion," that every hen cuckoo lays all her 

 eggs of one colouring only, and consequently (as a general rule) 

 lays only in the nesls of one species." 



Having now entered my most decided protest against the very 

 unjDhilosophical way of gelling rid of an unpalateable theory by 

 ridicule and perversion rather than by reason and argument, I 

 come to the subject-matter in hand, and that is to submit to the 

 readers of the ' Zoologist' a mass of evidence on the point collected 

 in Germany ; for if English ornithologists have shown themselves 



• 1853, pr. 307—326. 



