SNAKES SHELTERING YOUNG ^^^ 



that this should happen than that the female 

 Cuckoo should carry her egg in her bill in order to 

 place it in the nest of a small bird which would be 

 otherwise inaccessible ; or that the young unfledged 

 Cuckoo should be able to hoist its foster brethren 

 out of the nest ; yet both these facts have been 

 established by the testimony of unimpeachable 

 witnesses. 



When Gilbert White wrote to Pennant, in 

 September 1770, on the subject of woodcocks 

 carrying their young — a fact which he was evidently 

 inclined to doubt, notwithstanding the assertion 

 made by Scopoli in a work then lately published — 

 he penned a sentence which I have long since 

 committed to memory. " Candour," he says, 

 " forbids me to say absolutely that any fact is false 

 because I have never been witness to such a fact." 

 This, it seems to me, in the absence of strict 

 scientific proof, is a good mental attitude to assume 

 on the subject of this or any other discussion. 



