360 RURAL BIRD LIFE. 



naturalist will feel when, after hours of patient watching, 

 he gets a sight of a troop of timid Jays, or the Wood- 

 pecker busy in his search for food on some noble tree. 

 How elated when scaling the cliff's rugged side in search 

 of sea birds' eggs ; or, tramping over the wild and barren 

 moor, he flushes the Snipe or Ring Ousel from their 

 heathery bed, or startles the Curlew from its meal in the 

 fathomless marsh ! We might enlarge upon this subject 

 ad infinitum, but to a field naturalist these pleasures are 

 well known, and to the closet personage uncared for. 

 Suffice it to say, that he who takes Nature for his 

 tutor will experience delights indescribable from every 

 animate and inanimate object of the universe ; from the 

 tiny blades of grass to the largest forest tree — the 

 tiniest living atom, seemingly without form or purpose, 

 to its gigantic relation of much higher development. 

 The pages of Nature's mighty book are unrolled to the 

 view of every man who cares to haunt her sanctuaries. 

 The doctrine it teaches is universal, pregnant with truth, 

 endless in extent, eternal in duration, and full of the 

 widest variety. Upon the earth it is illustrated by end- 

 less forms beautiful and grand, and in the trackless 

 ether above, the stars and suns and moons gild its im- 

 mortal pages. 



The closet naturalist takes much more pride in 

 determining new species, giving them jaw-breaking 

 names, measuring with rule and compass the dried and 

 withered skins, which bear the indelible stamp of hideous 

 deformity, or writing long treatises on the habits of birds 

 and animals that seem to look on in withering scorn 

 from their cases around him. All this is deemed highly 

 scientific by his brother savants ; but, my word upon it, 

 no person can form the slightest idea of the habits of 

 birds and animals from books written by such persons ; 



