10 ^ 
SKKIN FINCH. 
deep, and made soft and warm witli feathers, and 
generally a large quantity of horse-hair, and single 
pigs’ bristles, which secure a smooth resting-place for 
the eggs, and make, as Naumann justly remarks, one 
of the prettiest of nests. 
The eggs are about the size of the Siskins’, but 
shorter and rounder, very tender-shelled, and in colour 
resembling the Linnets’, having a ground of greenish 
white, with solitary dots and short streaks of a dull 
or dark blood red, or reddish brown, forming a kind 
of wreath oftentimes round the larger end. They sit 
fourteen days, and this duty is performed entirely by 
the female, while the male often feeds her most 
tenderly from his crop. 
The late lamented Mr. Edward Tuck, of M^allington 
ilectory, near Baldock, Hertfordshire, who took a 
great interest in the progress of my work, wrote to 
me an account of his observation of this bird in the 
south of France, and promised to send me the nest 
and eggs. The fatal disease, however, which took 
him to the sunny climate of the south of France, has 
since then terminated fatally; and it is with a melan- 
choly interest I record an extract from one of his 
letters, which displayed not only considerable knowledge 
of natural history, but powers of observation, which 
would, had he been spared, have done much good to 
the science, in the pursuit of which he w'as so fond. 
The letter is dated June 15th., 1859; — 
“I have lately returned from Cannes, where I passed 
several months of the winter; but I am sorry to say 
have met w'ith very little indeed in the ornithological 
way. . . .Provence is generally a very dry and barren 
country, and you only find birds in the valleys, on 
the borders of streams. With regard, however, to the 
