Letters, Extracts from Correspondence, Notices, ^c. 479 
ture, has been rather too lavish of his indignation, and has a little 
overcoloured his statements. It is a charge frequently made 
against egg-collectors, that they have been instrumental to the 
extinction of certain of our rarest and most interesting birds. 
As far as I am acquainted with the subject, the charge seems 
to me to be incorrect. “ Oophilus ” instances the Golden Eagle 
as a case in point. I wish simply to ask him, Who is more 
likely to preserve the remnant of this species in Scotland—the 
Highland forester to whom (solely through the demands occasioned 
by egg-collecting) an Eagle’s nest is the source of a permanent 
annual income of a few pounds, or the man who has every in¬ 
ducement in the shape of rewards offered by his master for the 
destruction of Eagles, without a counterbalancing consideration 
of any kind ? I believe, Sir, that so long as we abstain from 
putting the old birds to death, the occasional and judicious taking 
of their eggs is no more likely to exterminate Eagles than 
the same process to desolate our poultry-yards of their in¬ 
habitants. 
“ The indiscreet zeal of the true naturalist” has not much, 
depend upon it, to answer for in the way of birds. With other 
classes of animals it may be different. I could imagine that any 
very local species of insect (Hipparchia blandina, let us say) might 
be almost extirpated in a single season by injudicious captures, 
especially if effected before the newly emerged imago had been 
able to deposit its fertile eggs. But I will not wander from my 
subject, and I will leave this matter to those who concern them¬ 
selves with butterflies, only in conclusion expressing my inability 
to comprehend the connexion between the “ruthless feats” of 
the unnamed friend of “ Oophilus 33 and the presumed frauds 
which he is so very properly anxious to expose. 
I am, Sir, 
Your obedient Servant, 
Oologicus. 
The valuable and extensive collection of birds formed by the 
veteran ornithologist, the late Baron E. de Lafresnaye, in his 
chateau near Falaise, is about to be sold. The administrators of 
