GREAT BLACK WOODPECKER IN ENGLAND. 341 
with such unbelief as I myself should perhaps bestow upon him, 
were he other than myself, or not an intimate acquaintance. So 
that my critics have perhaps, in the main, done as they would 
be done by. I shall in this letter refer to no criticisms of ‘The 
Birds of Herefordshire,’ the work of my old and valued friend 
Dr. Bull, except in so far as these criticisms relate to certain 
observations of mine therein recorded. 
* * x # * 
T adhere to every statement made by me concerning English 
and foreign birds. But it may be due to some readers that I 
should add a very few particulars concerning my observations of 
Picus martius, and one brief explanation of a statement, disbe- 
lieved, concerning Jynzx torquilla. Iam not going to weigh the 
evidence of Capt. Mayne Reid (Zool. p. 196); and I know nothing 
of what befell Mr. D. R. Chapman at Belmont, or of the reasons 
why he seems to be slightly ignored. 
It is through necessity that this letter is almost entirely 
egoistic. The only witnesses who in my company had an excel- 
lent view of Picus martius in England were Mr. E. W. Du Buisson, 
M.R.C.S., of Castle Street, Hereford, who permits me to state 
that he has a vivid recollection of the occurrence, and believes 
he can still point out the tree in Ruckhall Wood in which we 
watched the strange visitor,—and in 1876 my daughter, who 
retains a similar recollection of this bird as we saw it at Mount 
Edgecumbe, in Devonshire. But although these witnesses were 
at those dates keen young naturalists, and well acquainted with 
the appearance and the notes of the three well-known British 
Woodpeckers, they were each at those respective dates only about 
ten or twelve years of age,—too young, perhaps, to add much 
weight to my testimony, in the thoughts of my critics. I heard 
the cry of Picus martius twice, unmistakably, at Pengethley Gorse, 
Ross; once, unmistakably, in the parish of Fownhope; once, 
dubiously, distant and uncertain, on the Little Doward. For 
myself, I possessed the faculty, which I still retain (though 
my ornithological rambles are probably over), of never forgetting 
the note of any bird which I had once heard ; together with the 
barbaric habit of tracking silently, at home or abroad, through 
brambles and leaves, those animals whose voices I had heard, but 
not as yet identified, until this habit became no longer necessary. 
But there is one barbarous deed which I never committed, though 
