REVIEWS OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
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tongues —so considerable a number is required to make a tolerable meal for a 
single individual; and secondly, because it wars against our associations, poetical 
and ornithological, to put the ‘‘songster of sky and cloud,” or the melodious 
tenants of the grove, to so gross a purpose. When other and more obviously 
natural food becomes scarce, or when there shall be a grievous lack of dainties 
for the palate, then and then only shall we consent to feed on dishes of Night¬ 
ingales* tongues, or of Blackbirds. That the feeling is u selfish,” we willingly 
admit. When a man performs a benevolent action, he does it to gratify his 
Benevolence; when he performs a conscientious action, he does so to gratify his 
Conscientiousness ; when he murders a fellow-creature, he commits the brutal 
action to gratify Ms Destructiveness , and other low passions. Finally, every 
action, good or evil, of every human being, is performed with a view of gratifying 
some faculty or faculties; all these are selfish objects, and cannot be otherwise. 
The only distinction can be as regards the tendency of such actions, since they 
are all supposed—however erroneously—to conduce to the happiness of the indivi¬ 
dual most concerned. 
“ On referring to the descriptions of the Blackbird by British authors, I find nothing in them to 
which the reader may be desired to look; and I may be allowed to observe that my own observa¬ 
tions, and those of Mr. Weir, recorded above, seem to aflord a fuller history of the species than 
any hitherto published in this country at least. Montagu and Selby are both remarkably brief 
on the subject; but Mr. Wood treats it in an interesting manner, presenting, as he generally does 
with species which he has carefully studied, a full account of its habits. In one or two cases of 
no great importance I should be inclined, however, to dissent from his opinion. Thus, he says , 6 its 
strains are not so loud as thoss of the Garden Thrush but I think they are much^ouder, although 
probably they cannot be distinctly heard at so great a distance.”—p.98. 
Mr. M’G., while he conceives (p. 113) that the Fieldfare may be found to 
breed in Britain more frequently than at present supposed, shrewdly suspects 
the nest may in some instances have been mistaken, a person having brought 
him the eggs of the Missel Thrush for those of the Fieldfare. 
In Winter the Missel Thrush is more easily shot in the retired shrubberies and 
parks of England than appears to be the case in the neighbourhood of the Scotch 
capital; but at other seasons it is remarkably shy and distant. Mr. Weir men¬ 
tions (p. 122) that the Missel Thrush kills and eats young birds, which is a fresh 
and hitherto unrecorded instance of the well-known keenness of its appetite. 
The author agrees with other writers in stating (p. 118) that the flocks of Missel 
Thrushes seldom exceed twenty; but Mr. Weir says (p. 124) that in his 
neighbourhood they assemble in large numbers in Winter, and on Aug. 11, 1837, 
he saw about seventy of them flying and feeding in the same way as the Field¬ 
fares, on the estate of Sir Wm. Baillie, at Polkommet. Might not some of these 
birds have been Fieldfares ? 
Mr. Weir (p. 137) expresses surprise that in a work published so recently as 
