52 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF 
a place for depositing its eggs and sheltering its 
little brood: different genera and different species 
set about the task in a manner suitable to their 
several natures ; yet every individual of the same 
species collects the same kind of materials, puts 
them together in the same form, and chooses the 
same sort of situation for placing this temporary 
habitation. The young bird of the last year, which 
never saw the building of a nest, pursues the allotted 
plan in the structure of it, and instinctively selects 
the usual materials its parents did before, and birds 
of the same species, in different and distant countries^ 
act in a similar manner. The swallows of Britain 
and those of the remote parts of Germany observe an 
uniform order of architecture, and in many instances 
have been known to return to the same places in 
which they had reared their young the year before. 
Britain is neither remarkable for the production 
of the powerful and sanguinary among quadrupeds 
and birds ; for the venomous among insects and 
reptiles ; nor for those which afford substances for the 
materia medica. 
So fortunate is England, that few, if any indi- 
viduals of the animal kingdom are here found 
decidedly and naturally possessed of that degree 
of virulence, either in their bite or any other property, 
constituting poison. The viper {Coluber herus of 
Linnseus) is the only species of our native serpents 
that has with any degree of precision been ascer- 
tained to have a specific venom. The Anguis fragilis^ 
which is met with in some districts, has been accused 
