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history of the Cuckow is extraordinary, i desired my very estimable 
friend Lord Suffield, 1 * to enquire that of Mr Hunter ; s he is perfectly 
satisfied of Jennor’s accuracy. He was his Pupil & lived in his 
house upwards of four years. Jennor sent parts of the account of 
the Cuckow to Mr Hunter 18 months, or more, before they were 
published. Hunter has himself repeated some of the experiments, 
& found them correct : & this last Summer, he put a Blackbirds 
egg into a hedge Sparrow’s nest, & left three of her own eggs; & the 
Sparrow hatched them & brought them all up. Mr Hunter was 
not perfectly satisfied, that the ejecting the young sparrows from 
the nest, was the act of the young Cuckow only, hut suspected 
some aid of the foster-mother : however she & the Blackbird let 
the young Sparrows enjoy their nest quietly. — Hunter told his Ldp. 
that he was now making repeated observations upon a species of 
the Nightingale sent to him from Germany, as a song Bird. 
Accident led him to suspect, that this Bird could (if one may 
so speak) see clearly in the dark. His time of frolic is after 
midnight : he then hops about the Cage from perch to perch, 
& from the wires of one side, to the other side. Hunter has 
changed the Cage, & altered the places of the perches, & taken 
every precaution to exclude every particle of Light ; & being shut 
up in the closet with the Bird, says, he hears him hop from perch 
to perch, & so on without ever seeming to blunder or mistake. He 
is almost certain of the fact. 3 I have transcribed Lord Suffield’s 
words that he wrote. — From my own knowledge i can say but little, 
only, that on the tenth of last November, a Swallow laid dead just 
under the window of the room i live in ; so we must see it the day 
it fell : & as the last of my Swallows appearing, was on the 30 
of Sep. this Bird was most likely in it’s torpid state, when some 
1 Sir Ilarbord Harbord, created Lord Suffield 1786, died 1810.— A. N. 
s John Hunter, the celebrated anatomist and physiologist, founder of the 
Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Born 1728, died 1794. 
— A.N. 
3 I am not aware of any record of these observations (though doubt- 
less made at the time, according to Hunter’s practice) having been 
published. From the expression used in the text the bird seems not to 
have been the common species of Nightingale ( Daulias luscinia), and if 
not it was doubtless the “ Sprosser ” ( D. philomela ) which is common in 
eastern Germany. — A.N. 
