42 HANDBOOK OF BRITISH INLAND BIRDS 
less up to midsummer as the Chiff-chaff's. It is a 
very sweet cadence of about a dozen notes, 
irregularly dropping down the scale, and is very 
familiar among the budding woodlands of April 
and early May, especially among the new verdure 
of the larch-woods. When the famous American 
naturalist Burroughs spent some weeks in this 
country studying the songs of English birds, he 
considered the Willow Wren's song to be one of the 
sweetest we possess, ranking its quiet and un- 
obtrusive beauty above the music of many better- 
known songsters. Neither this bird nor the next 
is really any near relation of the Wren's, and they 
do not even look as if they were, except so far as one 
small bird is necessarily rather like another. It 
would doubtless be more accurate and scientific 
always to use their book-names of Willow Warbler 
and Wood Warbler, but most people who are fond 
of birds in their natural haunts dislike the museum 
atmosphere of such new and rather artificial titles 
in English, especially when there is always the 
scientific Latin name for the necessary purposes of 
classification. There is surely not much harm in 
speaking of the Willow Wren by his most familiar 
name, so long as we know enough of his ways to 
understand that the common Wren and he are 
thoroughly different birds. If people, on the other 
hand, do not care to know anything about a bird 
