NATURAL HISTORY NOTES. 
to Musivell Hill, and it was a common subject of complaint in Highgate that we 
could not see the railway from the wood without going quite to the edge. At 
length, however, the Mayor, and Commonalty, and Citizens have begun to fell 
the trees on the north, so that people in the centre of the wood will soon be able 
to look at the railway when they are tired of the porter and the petticoats. But 
there are a number of new red-brick houses on the east side of the wood, and I 
regret to say that I observe no clearing of timber in that direction. Surely, Sir, 
a man who stands in the centre of the wood, and knows that there are new red- 
brick houses to the east of him, will not be happy unless he sees them. 
“.Sir, it is Spring : birds are pairing, and the County Council has begun to carve 
the mud-pie which it made last year at the bottom of Waterlow Park. I do not 
know how to address the Mayor and Commonalty; but the Citizens of the City of 
London all read The Standard, and surely they will respond to my appeal and will 
not continue to screen from my yearning gaze any one of those objects of interest 
which one naturally desires to see when one goes to the centre of a wood.” 
A. E. H. 
Protection of Birds.- — The County Council of Cornwall have set an 
example to other counties in showing a regard for our feathered friends. The 
London Gazette of December ll, stales that the Home .Secretary has made an 
order under Section 2 of the Wild Birds Protection Act, 1S94, upon the applica- 
tion of the County Council of Cornwall, prohibiting the taking or destroying of 
the eggs of the Cornish chough in any part of the county. Will other coumies 
go and do likewise in respect to their local fauna? — Graphic. 
NATURAL HISTORY NOTES AND QUERIES. 
A Cuckoo Note. — On p. 225 of your last number (vol. v., Dec., 1894), 
your contributor, Mr. W. J. C. Miller, in his interesting paper on “ A Bird- 
Loved Suburb,” refers incidentally to a question concerning the newly -hatched 
cuckoo, which has, I believe, never been satisfactorily answered. He mentions 
the young cuckoo’s “sad behaviour towards its nest-mates.” 
The question, as I understand it, is this : — The famous — or, as some woul 1 
say, the infamous — Dr. Jenner obtained his distinction of F.R.S. by a paper on 
the “Natural History of the Cuckoo,” which can be read in the Phiiosophicat 
Transactiotts for 1788. In this paper he not only gives details of his having 
observed the young cuckoo eject its fellow nestlings, but he declares that the 
bird is designedly formed with a broad and hollow back, so as to enable it to 
accomplish these evictions. Some forty years later, the eminent naturalist 
Waterton denounced the notion as an absurd one ; and Dr. Norman Moore, in 
the Dictiojiary of Natural Biography, roundly accuses Jenner of having de- 
clared that he had repeatedly witnessed what could never have been seen at all. 
Nevertheless, it is almost universally believed that the young cuckoo does eject 
its comrades from the nest ; and it would be interesting and useful if, in the 
coming season, your readers would carefully watch nests in which a cuckoo’s 
egg has been deposited, and would report to you what they observe. My own 
impression is that neither W.atertcn nor Dr. Moore has done Jenner justice. 
That the bird is specially fashioned so as to facilitate this operation is, I believe, 
quite a delusion. Certainly no anatomist has, by a series of dissections, at various 
ages, proved that the young cuckoo has this temporary peculiarity in its forma- 
tion ; and, until some scientific proof is forthcoming, the idea may be dismissed 
as chimerical. But anyone who has watched young thrushes in the nest must 
have noticed how, for the purpose of relieving nature, they violently thrust the 
rump backwards and upwards until it overhangs the nest’s edge, and in this wav- 
one young bird might very easily be overbalanced by another, and fall from the 
nest. This, I believe, is exactly what happens in the case of the young cuckoo. 
