120 
TURDUS SOLITARIUS. 
most effectual, and agreeable method to remove that 
cause. What could the wisest man have done better ? 
Call it reason, or instinct, it is the same that a sensible 
man would have done in this case. 
“ After the same manner this bird reasoned with 
respect to the wasps. He found, by experience and 
observation, that the first he attempted to swallow hurt 
his throat, and gave him extreme pain ; and, upon 
examination, observed that the extremity of the abdo- 
men was armed with a poisonous sting ; and, after this 
discovery, never attempted to swallow a wasp until he 
first pinched his abdomen to the extremity, forcing out 
the sting, with the receptacle of poison.” 
It is certainly a circumstance highly honourable to 
the character of birds, and corroborative of the fore- 
going sentiments, that those who have paid the most 
minute attention to their manners, are uniformly their 
advocates and admirers. “ He must,” said a gentleman 
to me the other day, when speaking of another person, 
— “ He must be a good man ; for those who have long 
known him, and are most intimate with him, respect 
him greatly, and always speak well of him.” 
94 . TURDUS SOLITARIUS , WILSON TURDUS MINOR , GMELIN. 
HERMIT THRUSH. 
WILSON, PLATE XLIII. FIG. II. 
The dark solitary cane and myrtle swamps of the 
southern States are the favourite native haunts of this 
silent and recluse species; and the more deep and 
gloomy these are, the more certain we are to meet 
with this bird flitting among them. This is the species 
mentioned, while treating of* the wood thrush, as having 
been figured and described, more than fifty years ago, 
by Edwards, from a dried specimen sent him by my 
friend Mr William Bartram, under the supposition that 
it was the wood thrush, ( turdus melodus .) It is, how- 
ever, considerably less, very differently marked, and 
