The Minstrels of the Summer. 25 



teur or professional, "who would dare to molest them. I can 

 only say more about the nightingale's song that the best de- 

 scription of it is in Conder's Star in the East, and that to 

 account for its disappearance when its short season of love and 

 song is over, Carew has a capital conceit — 



" Ask me no more, whither does haste 

 The nightingale ; when May is past. 

 For in your sweet, dividing throat 

 She winters, and keeps warm her note." 



What a mystery is migration, and how much greater a mystery 

 has it been made by that class of naturalists who persist in 

 treating animals as if they were mere receptacles for food and 

 vehicles of fur and feathers. The Marquis of Worcester's disqui- 

 sition is worth reading for its quaintness, but the notions of 

 Linnaeus do discredit to that generally broad-minded philoso- 

 pher, for the great master clung to the notion of swallows 

 hybernating under the waters of ponds, and in Ellis's Cor- 

 respondence of Linnceus are particulars of the experiments for 

 any who would have a laugh at the great Swede. Stranger 

 still that Gilbert White, most observant of observers, had a 

 secret fancy for the hybernating theory, though well aware of 

 the fact that the temperature of the blood of any of our summer 

 birds is higher than that of man, or any other of the most 

 active creatures. For a bird to hybernate, especially under 

 water, is simply impossible. So energetic is the life of these 

 little creatures that while they remain with us they scarcely 

 sleep at all. You shall see swallows and swifts darting about 

 till the last moment of twilight, and you shall see them again 

 at half-past two next morning wheeling aloft and twittering as 

 freshly as if they needed no rest, and so with the cuckoo and 

 the warblers, the almost unbroken continuance of their song* 

 during the twenty-four hours round, is a proof of the energy of 

 the circulation and all the vital processes. Their bones are 

 hollow, they are themselves reservoirs of oxygen, and the 

 flame of life burns more fiercely in their breasts than in any 

 other class of animated creatures. Dr. Derham, in his Physico- 

 Philosophy , notices two circumstances about migratory birds, 

 first, that these untaught, unthinking creatures, should know the 

 proper times for then passage, when to come and when to go ; 

 as also that some should come when others retire. Now to call 

 them untaught and unthinking is to beg the question. In what 

 revelation do we read that they are in either case such utter 

 negatives? surely only in the revelation of human vanity. Ex- 

 periments with which every tamer and teacher of birds is 

 familiar, prove that their natural songs are acquired by the 

 same process as we acquired a knowledge of A, B, C at school. 

 As you pass along the side of a copse in July and August, you 



