90 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 



thirty more ounces were immediately required. The 

 wage of one of his laborers is said to have sufficed for 

 his personal needs, and his sleeping apartment had 

 neither bed, chair, nor carpet; he lay on bare boards, 

 wrapped in a blanket, with an oaken block for pillow; 

 and he is said to have never tasted fermented liquor and 

 to have eaten but sparingly of meat. His daily habit 

 was to retire at eight and rise at three o'clock in the 

 morning, and he was always dressed by four ; an ardent 

 Roman Catholic, he would spend an hour at devotion in 

 his private chapel; he then read Latin and Spanish au- 

 thors, wrote his polemics against Audubon or any others 

 with whom he came in conflict, and received the re- 

 ports of his bailiff, all before breakfast, which was at 

 eight o'clock; the remainder of the day was mostly de- 

 voted to his birds and other animals, to preserve which 

 he surrounded his entire estate with a high rampart of 

 stone, said to have cost, all told, $50,000. 



Though a devout Romanist, as someone has re- 

 marked, Waterton never hesitated to adopt the same 

 mode of reasoning which Hume had employed in his 

 argument against miracles. Thus he rejected with scorn 

 Edward Jenner's account of how the young parasitic 

 Cuckoo, when but a day old and hardly able to stand, 

 turned out of their nest its rightful occupants. This 

 account, which was generally accej)ted then, and has 

 been repeatedly verified and recorded by the camera 

 since, "carries," said Waterton, "its own condemnation, 

 no matter by whom related, or by whom received." 

 Trusting to analogy again, he maintained that Audu- 

 bon's description of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird 

 gluing bits of lichen to the surface of its nest with 

 saliva was false, because "the saliva of all birds imme- 

 diately mixes with water," and the first shower of rain 



