LOCALITIES. 
“Seek'st thou the plasliy brink 
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, 
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink 
On the chafed ocean side ?” 
W HO can tell of the habits of our wild fowl and aquatic 
bird9 as well as the men who, dty in and day out, 
in-cold and heat, and in aT kinds of weather, follow shoot¬ 
ing for a livelihood? Unfortunately for the public, these 
men cannot, for the most part, spare the time to dot down 
their experience. Indeed, but few of them cm write, and 
what, if recorded, would be of rial value to the shooting world 
is lost. The educated sportsman is rarely of assistance in 
this mat'er, for he, as a general thing, leaves everything to 
his baymeri, and with a profound ignorance as to the habi's 
of the birds, learns little and remembers but little after a 
week’s shooting, save the number and quality of the fowl 
brought to bag during his holiday. If he has had good shoot¬ 
ing, he is generally lbe:al to the caterer to his sport; but 
for the life of him he cannot tell why the stools were set to 
windward, or why he had better or worse shooting than the 
guns in the other “rigs.” Our experience has taught us 
that too often the purely scientific man knows even less, and 
that many works on ornithology abound in absurd inaccura¬ 
cies, w r hich lead to “confusion worse confounded.” True, 
the scientists tell us the measurements and weight, and the 
! coloring and shading of each bird, but often these descrip¬ 
tions are of the faded plumage cf the dead specimen, and not 
of the live fowl. When colored plates are introduced into 
their works, they are often so unlike the bird they are in¬ 
tended to represent, that if it were not for the name under¬ 
neath it would be impossible to identify them. In fact, wo 
Lave seen several which resemble Egyptian hierog’yphics 
more than birds that have been seen to fly. It is from works 
