162 EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY 
stews would wish ; for within a short time it bears off every 
fish.”’* 
In the seventeenth century it was becoming rarer, the 
introduction of firearms having begun to lessen its num- 
bers. The poet Drayton, whose description of Lincolnshire 
was published in 1622, speaks of “ the Osprey, oft here seen, 
though seldom here it breeds,’’t+ which does not imply great 
abundance. 
It has been supposed that the Osprey was sometimes tried 
by falconers, but probably with no success. An Act in the 
reign of William and Mary prohibiting the taking of salmon 
by Hauks, Racks, Gins, etc.,t has given colour to this idea, 
but the “ Hauk” here ailuded to was a kind of fish-trap, 
and not the bird.¢ Mr. Harting, however, has shown that 
Ospreys were certainly kept by James I. with Cormorants 
and tame Otters on the Thames at Westminster. || 
Various other birds are enumerated by William Harrison, 
among which are the dotterel or wind, so named from the 
windy or foolish character which it bore, the pauper [Spoonbill], 
crane, bitter, bustard, snite, pewet [Black-headed Gull], notte 
[Knot], oliet or olife [Oystercatcher], dunbird, kite, woodspike 
and woodnawe [Woodpeckers], ruddock [Robin], washtaile 
[Wagtail], cheriecracker [?], tiuit ? [Tit], and several more. 
Aldrovandus.—There is not a great amount which is 
original in Aldrovandus’s sixteen portly volumes—the 
“ Historia Naturalium ” (1599-1603)—a work of compilation 
stated by Newton to have been mostly printed after the 
author’s death in 1605,§ and altogether very inferior to that 
of Gesner, from whom the whole of Aldrovandus’s account 
of the Solan Goose (Tom. ter., liber XIX., ch. xx.) has been 
appropriated. Aldrovandus gives as many as seven illustra- 
tions of the Ruff and Reeve, and of these, one has been 
discovered by Mr. W. H. Mullens to have been copied from 
* Evan's translation, p. 37. 
t ‘‘Poly-Olbion,” 8. XXV. 
t This Act is given in Nelson’s ‘‘ Laws Concerning Game,’’ 1751, p. 88. 
§ The ‘‘ New English Dictionary’ (Vol. V., p. 131) cites as the earliest 
use of the word “ hawk ”’in this sense a passage in John Worlidge’s ‘‘ System 
of Agriculture ”’ (1669), where it is described as a fish trap. 
|| “‘ Essays on Sport and Natural History,” p. 429. 
{ Three volumes completed by 1603 (‘‘ Dict. of Birds,’’ p. 6). 
