THE HABITS OF OUR BIRDS. 119 
of Massachusetts, and especially of that part where Mr. 
Nuttall resided for many years, is the I etic mini- 
mus, the habits of which, its nesting and eggs, he fully 
describes, but all of which he attributes to iis entirely 
different .species which, so far as I am aware, is never 
found in Massachusetts: I mean the Empidonax Aca- 
dicus. To be sure Mr. Nuttall was not alone in this. 
Even after the Bairds had discovered and described the 
E. minimus as a new species, it was several years before 
the natural sequence was traced out to its legitimate end. 
It seems to us now remarkable, as we look back upon 
the past, and consider how familiar a bird the Least Fly- 
Catcher was to Mr. Nuttall, that he never once seems to 
have suspected it of being a new and undescribed species. 
The error made by Wilson in describing the nest and egg 
of the Z. Acadicus, may have contributed to delay and 
to prevent the discovery of the general error and of the 
confounding of the species. It was not until by a lucky ac- 
cident, a parent bird of the true F. Acadicus, shot on its 
nest, was sent, with its eggs and nest, to Prof. Baird, that 
the whole was made clear, and facts in regard to the two 
species rightly understood. And here the writer may 
as well make the confession that all the while he had 
_ in his own cabinet the eggs of both species, but suppos- 
age the one to be the Acadicus, by the rule of exclusion 
~ he guessed the other to be, possibly, the egg of the 
minimus, and both were wrong of course. The late Dr. 
Henry Bryant also, one of our most acute and observing 
ornithologists, * calls attention to what he supposed to be an 
error of writers in speaking of the Acadicus, as being wild 
and inhabiting the most solitary places, he having found 
the supposed birds generally quite familiar, and breed- 
* Proceedings of the Boston S iety of Natural History, vol. vi. p. 430. 
