THE AMERICAN SNIPE. 
Scolopax Wilsoni. 
THE ENGLISH SNIPE. 
Ir is a singular thing, and one which elucidates the 
great research necessary, and the extreme difficulties en- 
countered, in the attempt to establish facts of natural 
history with regard to birds of passage, that this beauti- 
ful little bird, the general favorite of the sportsman and 
the epicure, well known to all classes of men, and a vis- 
itant, in some one of its closely allied varieties, of every 
known nation, is still a mystery, as regards some of its 
habits, and continues to bafile the inquiries of the most 
learned and inquisitive ornithologists. 
Its habits, the nature of its food, and therefore the ne- 
cessities of its existence, render it an inhabitant of tem- 
perate climates, and of regions in which the moist and 
loamy soil, from which it derives its sustenance of small 
worms, insects, and the like, is not frozen during the pe- 
riod of its visitations so hard as to preclude its boring 
with its delicate and sensitive bill for its semi-aquatic 
prey of worms and larve. 
