58 Life History of Common Cuckoo. 



have recourse to such as demand exact matching of 

 eggs as Professor Newton above has told us ? In 

 every case of that kind the cuckoo takes on itself 

 a lot of trouble for nothing. And, besides, what do 

 you make of the bird out of a blue egg that was laid 

 in a brown blotched egg-laying birds' nest — would it, 

 when its turn came, choose a blue-laying bird's nest 

 to drop its eggs in, or would it choose the same kind 

 of nest as that it came out of ? 



Dr. Bowdler Sharpe has yet this problem to solve 

 and this question to answer. Thus the two state- 

 ments of tendency expressed in the one case, as con- 

 tinuing to deposit the blue eggs (a la Dr. Bowdler 

 Sharpe, Seebohm, and Professor Newton) "in the 

 nest of some blue-egg-laying species," and in the 

 other, as "by preference laying in the nest of the 

 species which brought her up," are almost through 

 the whole range exclusive of each other, simply be- 

 cause such a large number of blue eggs are laid, 

 not in blue-egg nests, but in others. The two ten- 

 dencies cannot be brought into harmony in view of 

 facts. 



Even so late as 1873, as the much cuckoo-laden 

 volume of the Zoologist for that year bears witness. 

 Professor Alfred Newton was very sceptical about 

 blue cuckoo's eggs, openly expressing doubts as to 

 the correctness of Dr. Baldamus's report in that par- 

 ticular, and so positive was he that the Rev. Alfred 

 C. Smith, after citing from a letter to the Field, Mar. 

 15th, 1873, where the Professor declared, that so far 

 as he was aware, " no one has ever found in the nest of 

 a hedge-sparrow a cuckoo's egg which is similar to 

 that of the hedge-sparrow," simply went on to print 



