INTRODUCTION. 
25 
or Wood-Pigeon. Over the meadow, a reddish-coloured 
hawk is hovering with rapid but scarcely perceptible move- 
ments of its expanded wings. It is fixed, as it were, in a 
particular spot, evidently intent on something that lies on 
the ground beneath it. Now it advances, hovers, sweeps 
away, hovers again, descends like a stone, and flies off with 
something in its claws. It must be the Kestrel. And thus 
one continues taking note, and recording his observations, not 
merely in his memory, but also on paper. He searches for 
nests, too, collects eggs, and, in short, does all that he can 
to master his subject. Such a person cannot fail to know 
something about birds sooner than he who merely goes to a 
museum to study them. It may be said that all this labour 
is misapplied, for that after all little good is done by it ; but 
I am not here to argue about utility, but simply to shew how 
one may become an ornithologist. The propriety of becom- 
ing so he must settle with his own conscience. 
A naturalist and a mere collector are quite different per- 
sons. Every naturalist must be a collector ; but there are 
those who, having a certain liking to natural objects — often 
also to prints, paintings, teapots, snuff-boxes, tobacco-pipes, 
clubs, spears, swords, and in short almost any thing colle- 
gible, — accumulate day after day, ticket, arrange, dust, and 
fondle their specimens, until they have lost sight of nature 
altogether. They neither use them, nor allow another to 
apply them to any reasonable purpose. 
Among the objects to be collected by the ornithologist are 
nests and eggs. The former may be kept in large boxes 
fitted with trays, or in cabinets. Eggs, arranged in small 
card-boxes partially filled with cut moss, are not only very 
beautiful, but useful objects. They should be blown by 
making small openings in the shell, not at the two ends, but 
near them. Or the contents may be extracted by sucking 
them into the large bulb of a pointed glass tube made for 
the purpose, or in various other ways. In collecting eggs, 
