148 
NATURAL HISTORY 
that a soft-billed bird should subsist on the same food with 
the hard-billed, for the former have thin membranaceous 
stomachs suited to their soft food; while the latter, the 
granivorous tribe, have strong muscular gizzard s which, like 
mills, grind, by the help of small gravels and pebbles, what 
is swallowed. This proceeding of the cuckoo, of dropping 
its eggs as it were by chance, is such a monstrous outrage 
on maternal affection, one of the first great dictates of 
nature, and such a violence on instinct that, had it only been 
related of a bird in the Brazils or Peru, it would never have 
merited our belief. But yet, should it farther appear that 
this simple bird, when divested of that natural a-Topyri that 
seems to raise the kind in general above themselves, and 
inspire them with extraordinary degrees of cunning and 
address, may be still endued with a more enlarged faculty 
of discerning what species are suitable and congenerous 
nursing-mothers for its disregarded eggs and young, and 
may deposit them only under their care, this would be 
adding wonder to wonder, and instancing in a fresh manner 
that the methods of Providence are not subjected to any 
mode or rule, but astonish us in new lights, and in various 
and changeable appearances.^ 
of thirty-seven European species of birds in whose nests the egg of the 
cuckoo has been found more or less frequently, and to this list the editor 
of " The Ibis " was able to add fifteen others. On different authority, 
another list of twenty -two species is given in " The Birds of Middle- 
sex," p. 120. — Ed. 
^ Since the above remarks were wi-itten by Gilbert White, so many 
extraordinary facts in relation to the habits of the cuckoo have been 
brought to light, mainly through the researches of modern ornithologists, 
that it would be impossible within the compass of a foot-note to men- 
tion half of them. 
Commencing with the observations of Dr. Jenner (Phil. Trans, 
vol. Ixxviii. p. 225), the rrader may be referred to what has been pub- 
lished by Col. Montagu (Om. Diet. Introd.), Mr. Blackwall (Man- 
chester Memoirs, 2nd series), Mr. Durham Weir (Macgillivray's Hist. 
Brit. Bii-ds, vol. iii. p. 128), Dr. Baldamus (Naumannia, 1853, pp. 307- 
326), a very remarkable paper translated and epitomized by the Kev. 
A. C. Smith and Mr. George Dawson Rowley respectively in the 
"Zoologist," 1868, pp. 1145-1166, and "The Ibis," 1865, p. 178; 
Herr Adolf Miiller, in " Der Zoologische Garten," for Oct. 1868 ; 
