102 



SERIN FINCH. 



deep, and made soft and warm with 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 reel, 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 Wallington 

 Rectory, 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 was 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 

 nave met with 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 



