Notes at Brighton. 151 



Having got your birds, the next proceeding is to set them 

 up, so that no outrage, as is so common even in public 

 museums, be done to science. What can be more ridiculous 

 than to place your tree-birds on the ground floor, and your 

 ground-birds at the top of the collection ? No such error is 

 here committed. The collector has called in the carpenter, 

 scene-painter, botanist, and geologist, to aid him in showing, 

 so far as might be, the habitat of each species. Each case 

 is therefore a landscape picture in miniature. 



Take an example. Grass, actually brought from the spot, 

 is seemingly growing from between the stones and hillocks, 

 over which a bramble bush, wonderfully true to nature, is 

 spreading its prickly branches. From one of the sprays an 

 anxious little titlark is dropping a green caterpillar into a 

 young cuckoo's gaping mouth, while in the background the 

 titlark's mate, looking pertly on from a higher perch, ap- 

 pears only half-consenting to the transaction. There are 

 insects on the bramble leaves, plants amongst the under- 

 growth, and all are strictly after nature. This studious care 

 is apparent in all the cases. It is difficult to realize that 

 those are not real jays in a real poplar ; that the slimy 

 wood-work with its rusty ring, the marine vegetation and 

 refuse shells which make a background for the phalarope are 

 not the actual corner of the Shoreham oyster pond, of 

 which it is a fac-simile. Sometimes the effect is dramatic, as 

 with the carrion crow, black as night, upon a snow-white 

 bank, waiting for the death of the wounded teal, which is 

 crawling into a hole, with, leg draggling and wing out- 

 stretched. Sometimes it is comic as with the four barn 

 owls, sitting in a model — copied stone for stone and timber 

 for timber — of Chiltington Church belfry. 



But apart from the strikingly natural attitudes of the birds, 

 and the photographic spring, summer, autumn, and winter 



