178 
allf.n’s naturalist’s library. 
woven together with very slender twigs and a little moss and 
inner bark, the feathers being most numerous in the lining. 
Eggs -From five to six and occasionally seven in number. 
They are quite unmistakable, being of a lilac-grey or stone- 
grey ground-colour, with spots of black or blackish-brown, 
varying in size and intensity, but pretty equally distributed 
over the surface of the eggs, and accompanied by underlying 
spots of violet-grey, more or less distinctly indicated. Axis, 
o'95~i'o5 inch ; diam., 0 65-075. 
THE WARBLERS. FAMILY SYLVIITLE. 
This is one of the largest families of birds in the Old World, 
and embraces within its limits an assemblage of widely differ- 
ing forms. Thus it is extremely difficult to lay down charac- 
ters by which a student of ornithology may recognise a 
Sylviine bird, when he sees one alive or has a specimen in his 
hand. The form of bill is no certain indication, for the form 
of this organ varies greatly in the Warblers, as it does in the 
Thrushes. In most instances the bill is rather long, furnished 
with a small notch before the end of the upper mandible, and 
having rictal bristles at the gape. In many Warblers, how- 
ever, the rictal bristles and the notch in the bill are obsolete, 
while the latter organ is in many forms so flattened that 
the birds might well be taken for Flycatchers. Warblers can, 
however, be distinguished from Thrushes by the scuteilation 
of the tarsus, the members of the latter family always having 
a plain surface to the tarsus both before and behind, while 
in the Warblers there are indications of scales on the front 
aspect of the tarsal envelope. 
There is, however, one great and fundamental difference 
between the Sylviidce and the Turdidce , first insisted upon by 
Mr. Seebohm in the fifth volume of the “ Catalogue of Birds,” 
and that difference consists in the nature of the plumage of 
the young birds. Warblers never have spotted young, the 
latter resembling the adults in plumage, or at least differing 
very slightly from the latter. Accompanying this peculiarity 
of the immature plumage, there ensues a corresponding differ- 
ence in the method of moulting in the two families. Thus a 
young Warbler, during the first autumn of its life, goes 
