452 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



naturalist at Dover. I quote from a letter addressed to Mr. Stevens by 

 Mr. Webb on Mr. Gray's behalf, and sold with the egg : — " Mr. Gray, of 

 this town (Dover), who is an ornithologist and taxidermist, having been 

 informed by some lads who had been watching birds for him that they had 

 discovered a nest of eggs which they did not know, we were led to the spot, 

 but only to find one young bird hatched out, one broken egg, and one addled; 

 the latter you now have. Scarcely had the egg passed from hand to hand 

 when one of the boys called out, ' There's the old one ; look at his top- 

 knot!' And sure enough we saw a living Crested Lark close to us. There 

 could be no mistaking the long crest reclining backwards, Crane-like, quite 

 unlike an ordinary Lark's raised crest." It is curious also that the birds 

 made a second nest, from which another egg was obtained early in August. 

 This also passed into my hands. — C. A. Briggs (55, Lincoln's Inn Fields). 

 [The common Skylark so frequently exhibits a well-developed crest, 

 that we should not rely upon this point only to convince us that the bird 

 whose nest was found in Romney Marsh was Alauda cristata. It is a pity 

 that Mr. Gray did not carry his observation a little further, and note some 

 other distinguishing characters of the rarer species. The large bastard 

 primary he could not have seen, but he might have noticed the orange- 

 tawny colour of the under surface of the wing and the absence of white 

 from the tail feathers. — Ed.] 



The Dispersal of Acorns by Rooks. — In a recent number of 'Nature' 

 Mr. Clement Reid communicates the result of some interesting observations 

 made by him on the way in which Rooks are instrumental in dispersing 

 acorns, and thus causing oaks to spring up in places where none had grown 

 before. He says : — " In peat-mosses, on open chalk downs, and in ploughed 

 fields, often a mile or more from the nearest mature tree, one constantly 

 finds acorn-husks and also seedling oaks, which last a few months, or perhaps 

 a couple of years, and then die, the conditions being unfavourable. It has 

 always seemed to me, while studying the origin of the existing fauna and 

 flora of Britain, that this dispersal of acorns ought to give an important clue 

 to the means by which this country was again clothed when the climate 

 became more genial after the Glacial Epoch. The oak has the largest seed 

 of auy British plant, and if it can be carried distances of a mile or more, it 

 is evident that the whole of our present flora may have spread more rapidly 

 than is usually imagined, and may have crossed straits and wide rivers. I 

 have for several years noted the position of these seedling oaks, finding 

 them in places where no mammal would take the acorns. For instance, 

 they are common in auy of the New Forest peat-bogs that are withiu a 

 mile of an oak-tree. They are common also in some places on the top of 

 the escarpment of the South Downs, half a mile from oaks, and 300 or 

 400 feet above them. They are always associated with empty acorn-husks, 

 slabbed and torn in a peculiar way. In October and November Rooks feed 



