412 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



And he concludes : — " I think these quotations perfectly justify my 

 suggestion that russet might apply fo the gray colour of the 

 Jackdaw's head ; but that it ever could apply to the bright red of 

 the Cornish Chough's legs and feet, they seem to me — if language 

 has any meaning — absolutely to forbid. Finally, let me say that 

 a reconsideration of all the passages in Shakespeare in which 

 Chough occurs confirms me in the belief that it never meant 

 anything else but Jackdaw. In all the other passages Jackdaw 

 suits the sense much better than the Cornish Chough would." 



(2). Both the Editor and Professor Newton write under the 

 impression that the word "pated" occurs in Shakespeare but 

 once, and the latter rests upon this as an argument in favour 

 of the conjecture "patted." I say nothing of the fact that all the 

 six "old editions" agree in reading "pated," but the case is con- 

 siderably strengthened when we take into account the fact that 

 Shakespeare uses " pated " five times in addition to the passage 

 under discussion. These are : — bald-pated, t Measure for Measure,' 

 v. 1 ; crooked-pated, ' As You Like It,' iii. 2 ; knotty-pated and 

 not-pated, 'Henry IV.,' Pt. 1, ii. 4; and periwig -pated, 'Hamlet,' 

 iii. 2. With regard to another point raised by Professor Newton, 

 I confess that, in the face of such Shakespearian expressions as 

 "hoary-headed," "long-legged," "loose-bodied," "big-bellied," 

 " fat-brained," " lily-livered," &c, I do not understand him when 

 he writes (" with deference," it is true), "it was not the custom 

 in Shakespeare's time, as it has since become, to coin an adjective 

 in form of a participle from a purely English noun." 



(3). Even assuming that Shakespeare could have been guilty 

 of such a gallicism as "patted" for "legged" or "footed," there 

 is no proof — is there even any probability ? — that, inland-bred as 

 he was, he was familiar enough with the Cornish Chough and its 

 habits to include whole flocks of them (" many in sort") among 

 the quarry pursued by " the creeping fowler. " Of the six other 

 passages in the plays in which the word Chough occurs, there is 

 only one — the famous description of Dover cliff in ' King Lear'— 

 which raises the slightest presumption that the Cornish Chough 

 is intended, and here we are equally at liberty to adopt Mr. Mar- 

 shall's view, and understand the birds in question to be Daws, 

 as are most undoubtedly the " Choughs" which may be seen any 

 day " winging the midway air" along the cliffs of Bideford Bay. 



"Flocks of wild-geese" were doubtless frequently to be met 



