58 The Naturalist in Siluria. 



men knew not what bird it was, though he has been rang- 

 ing the woods around for upwards of thirty years. Yet in 

 these very woods Nuthatches are perhaps as numerous as 

 in any other part of England. This good man, however, 

 is not given to ornithological observation. ' His business 

 is with timber, lop and top, the split laths for palings, 

 the hurdle-bars, hop-poles, and pea-sticks. All these he 

 thoroughly understands, from the cutting down to the 

 carting off after being sold, and the price a purchaser 

 ought to pay for them. But birds he knows nothing 

 about, neither does he profess it. Alike deficient is he 

 in a knowledge of the four-footed ferce naturae, and equally 

 candid in disclaiming it. I verily believe that, while 

 going his rounds, if an eagle flew over his head, or a wild 

 cat scampered across his track, he would think no more 

 of the first than if it were only a sparrow-hawk, and as 

 little of the last as though but a rat or weasel. As he is 

 in every sense an honest, respectable man, I can forgive 

 him for this absence of interest in things which so much 

 interest me; though as a study to the naturalist — for man 

 is no exception to the subjects with which natural history 

 has to deal — his proclivities are as much a puzzle to me 

 as the mode in which the cuckoo deposits her egg in a 

 nest too small to admit the possibility of her there laying 

 .it, or the manner of procreation ascribed to the vivip- 

 arous blenny. 



But I must leave the unobservant wood-ranger, and 

 return to the bird of whose species he was ignorant, 

 though it must-have flitted before his eyes some hundreds, 

 if not thousands of times. The Nuthatch is deserving of 

 notice from the naturalist, much more than it appears 

 ever to have had. I have pronounced its plumage pretty, 

 and, without entering into minute details of its colour or 



