THE THRUSHES. 
24I 
flags, beautiful and compactly intertwined. The lining is also 
of twisted reeds, which, with the exception of a fragment of 
moss, seem to constitute the entire material of which the nest 
is composed. 
Eggs. — From four to six in number. Ground-colour dull 
white or brownish-white, thickly sprinkled with light brown 
overlying and violet-grey underlying spots, which collect round 
the larger end of the egg, and form a more or less defined dark 
zone. In many of the eggs the dark appearance of the large 
end is due to the predominance of the underlying spots. Axis, 
o'7s-o*8 inch ; diam., o - 55~o'6. 
THE THRUSHES, FAMILY TURDTD/E. 
The Thrushes are by many naturalists considered to be the 
highest of all birds in the natural system, on account of their 
powers of song, which place them at the head of the “ Oscines 
or “ songsters.” They are certainly highly-developed birds, and 
possess great perfection of structure. Many of them evince 
affinities with the Flycatchers, while others are allied to Warblers. 
There is, however, one character which separates the Thrushes 
from the latter family, and that is the spotted plumage of the 
young birds, a peculiar feature, by which we learn that the 
Nightingale, the Robin, and the Chats are all Thrushes, 
though for so many years they have been associated with the 
Warblers in works on natural history. The latter birds, too, 
have a double moult, in autumn and again in spring, whereas 
the Thrushes moult but once in the year, viz., in the autumn, 
when the young birds throw off their spotted plumage and 
assume that of the adults. 
The tarsus in the Turdidm is plain on both aspects, with the 
entire laminae smooth and without scutellations, though in a 
few instances young birds show a slight tendency to a scute, 
but this only occurs in a very few species. 
Thrushes may be said to be cosmopolitan in their range, and 
they occur even in the Pacific Islands, where very few forms 
which flourish in the Palaearctic and Nearctic Regions find a 
home. In fact, the Thrushes are even more universally distri- 
buted over th^ earth’s surface than the Crows. In America, 
