NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 369 
female is sitting ; she can shift her young when danger is near, 
she probably rolls them away with her wings. Goat- suckers 
like to have their nest in the hollow made by a horse's or 
cow's hoof They devour large quantities of beetles. 
It does not seem likely that this bird should use its foot 
to catch beetles ; the mouth is evidently adapted to take any 
sized beetle. If one of them be shot the beetles may be found 
alive in the pouch, especially when they are feeding their 
young. These birds make very fair progress on the boughs of the 
trees; they shuflie, not walk, along the branches. This is one of the 
very few birds Mr. Davy has not succeeded in keeping long. Mr. 
Searle informs me that the cockchafers are very small in Berk- 
shire, but in Hampshire they are large. Mr. Davy says that in 
the neighbourhood of London you get cockchafers both large and 
small alDout Hanipstead, and especially Lord Mansfield's wood 
there. 
Colonel Leathes kindly sent me in the summer of 1875 two 
young fern-owls, taken from the nest in his woods near Yar- 
mouth. I fed them on scraped beef and hard-boiled eggs, and 
they lived some weeks; they were very tame. The bristles 
round the sides of the mouth to assist in catching insects are 
very remarkable. 
Indian Grass, p. 73. — It is quite evident that silkworm gut, 
now so common, was not much known to anglers in the 
time of White. At the present time it forms the most important 
item, next to the hooks, in an angler's tackle. I do not 
think that Izaak Walton, who died in 1683, used mucli 
The gut is secreted from a fluid, contained in two long 
vessels lying at the side of the stomach of the silkworm ; these 
terminate in a single tube in the centre of the lower lip of 
the caterpillar, w^ho spins it as he wishes. It is probable 
that each thread of silk is double, half being secreted from 
one of the vessels above described, and the other half from 
its neighbour. 
All the treatises upon silk and silkworms, as well as those 
relating to animal products, to which I have access are 
singularly silent upon the subject of silkworm gut, for the 
simple reason, I suppose, that the authors knew nothing about 
the history of the subject. In my youthful days I used to 
make the silkw^orni gut myself. A silkworm must be watched 
until he is just beginning to spin. He must then be placed 
in ordinary vinegar and allowed to soak some forty -eight 
hours or longer. The operator must then take hold of its 
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