A NOTE ON THE LIFE OF THOMAS BEWICK. 13 - 
I am pleased to see Mr. Edwards’s “ Indictment ” in Nature 
Notes this month. A pair of spotted flycatchers have built their 
nest in the lattice over my window for three years, but the 
sparrows will not allow them to bring up their young. At first 
the sparrows were contented with smashing the flycatchers’ eggs, 
but this year the sparrows waited until the eggs were hatched, 
and — when the old birds had gone in search of food — -attacked, 
the little ones and killed them. I am in perfect sympath)'- with 
Mr. Edwards’s verdict, “ Let the sparrows be destroyed.” 
Braintree. Mabel Parmenter. 
A NOTE ON THE LIFE OF THOMAS BEWICK. 
NY reminiscences of Bewick are interesting, and 
• especially so to old folk, whose early recollections of 
the charms of rural life are associated with the famous 
woodcuts in Bewick’s Birds. A short passage in the 
life of Adam Sedgwick once more brings the grand old wood- 
cutter to mind, in connection with another remarkable man,. 
Robert Foster, of Hebblethwaite Hall. 
It was in 1821 that Sedgwick met Foster in Newcastle, and 
went with him to see a friend whom he described as “ a man 
of genius and a great humorist.” It was “ Bewick, the well- 
informed naturalist and celebrated engraver upon wood, and 
we had,” says Sedgwick, “a long and delightful interview with 
that great artist.”^ Thirteen years earlier, in 1808, Bewick 
was visited by another enthusiastic naturalist, Charles Fother- 
gill, the author of a small volume on The Philosophy of Natural 
History, and of a more important work on British Zoolof^y which 
has never been published. In a private letter to his uncle, 
William Fothergill, also a naturalist of some note (they are 
both mentioned by Yarrell, as well as Bewick), Charles Fother- 
gill tells him that he met Bewick at his printing office door, 
and was at once taken “ into his little study. He showed 
me the very spots where many of the living birds stood or ran, 
whilst he engraved their portraits. He said he was preparing 
another edition of his Birds, and was extremely desirous of 
filling up the gaps, as he termed them. I found, as I had 
often suspected, that those engravings which are inferior had 
been done from dried or badly stuffed specimens. The tail- 
pieces he had sketched by his fireside during the long evenings 
of winter, and not in tours made for the purpose, as I had been 
told. He said he loved birds too well to kill them, and had 
only shot one in all his life, and of that shot he had often 
Life of Adain Sedgxvick, vol. l, p. 233. 
