^a;/rad from the Diary of a Katuralist. 95 



tail, which he had no sooner done, than the headless neck bent 

 itself quickly round as if to strike him* This last movement may 

 by attributed to muscular habit. 



Every lover of nature will be touched with the eloquence of 

 the following passage from the journal of a Naturalist. 



" The little excursions of the naturalist, from habit and froni> 

 acquirement, become a scene of constant observation and remark^ 

 The insect that crawls, the note of the bird, the plant that flow- 

 ers, or the vernal green leaf that peeps out, engages his attention, 

 is recognized as an intimate, or noted from some novelty that it 

 presents in sound or aspect. Every season has its peculiar pro- 

 duct, and is pleasing or admirable, from causes that variously af- 

 fect our different temperaments or dispositions ; but there are 

 accompaniments in an autumnal morning's walk, that call for all 

 our notice and admiratioa: the peculiar feeling of the air, and 

 the solemn grandeur of the scene around us, dispose the mind to 

 contemplation and remark ; there is a silence in which we hear 

 every thing, a beauty that will be observed. The stump of an 

 old oak is a very landscape, with rugged alpine steeps bursting 

 through forests of verdant mosses, with some pale, denuded, 

 branchless lichen, like a scathed oak, creeping up the sides, or 

 crowning the summit. Rambling with unfettered grace, the ten- 

 drils of the briony (tamis communis) festoon with their brilliant 

 berries, green, yellow, red, the slender sprigs of the hazel, or the 

 thorn ; it ornaments their plainness, and receives a support its 

 own feebleness denies. The agaric, with all its hues, its shades, 

 its elegant variety of forms, expands its cone, sprinkled with the 

 freshness of the morning ; a transient fair, a child of decay, that 

 " sprang up in a night, and will perish in a night." The squirrel, 

 agile with life and timidity, gamboling round the root of an an- 

 cient beech, its base overgrown with the dew-berry, (rubus 

 ccEsius,) blue with unsullied fruit ; impeded in its frohc sports, 

 half angry, darts up the silvery bole again, to peep and wonder 

 at the strange intruder on his haunts. The jay springs up, and 

 screaming, tells of danger to her bi-ood ; the noisy tribe repeat 

 the call, are hushed, and leave us ; the loud laugh of the wood- 

 pecker, joyous and vacant, the hammering of the nuthatch, (sitta 

 europoea) cleaving its prize in the chink of some dry bough," &c. 



