58 Proceedings of the Newport Natural History Society. 
quarto pages, and is written with equal clearness and grace. 
He had made many dissections of the cuckoo, ascertained 
its usual food, compared its physical peculiarities with those 
of other birds, and entered in detail into all the phenomena 
attending its impregnation, gestation and delivery. He dis¬ 
cussed its times of appearance and departure, and the reasons 
that had been alleged concerning, and those that probably 
governed, its curious appropriation of the nests of other 
birds, and its entrusting its offspring to them as foster- 
parents, an apparent double perversion of natural instinct 
on the part both of the cuckoo and the bird that it impressed 
into its service. 
This paper was received by ornithologists with enthu¬ 
siasm, as explaining satisfactorily a number of mooted ques¬ 
tions. It is an axiom, however, that there is nothing good 
but must run the gauntlet of hostile criticism, and Jenner’s 
paper proved no exception. Mr. Charles Waterton, who to 
his reputation as a South American traveller and general 
naturalist had added that of a most accurate observer of 
the habits of birds — from his unique experiment of surround¬ 
ing his large estate of Walton Park, near Wakefield, York¬ 
shire, with a stone wall eight feet high, allowing it to 
degenerate into a perfect wilderness, and never permitting 
a shot to be fired upon the grounds, simply that he might 
make them a safe retreat for the rarer birds and the more 
timid beasts — challenged the accuracy of his statement as 
to the infant cuckoo’s unaided dispossessing the more legit¬ 
imate occupants of its nest. In his article upon “The Jay,” 
contained in his “Essays on Natural History” — several 
editions of which are at the Redwood Library—Waterton, 
while carefully refraining from using Jenner’s name, denied 
the fact “no matter by what person of high repute” he said, 
“it might have been asseverated.” Defenders of Jenner then 
appeared, who, supposing that Waterton must be correct, 
attempted to account for the discrepancy by laying stress 
upon Jenner’s having employed his nephew Henry to assist 
him in making these observations, and by suggesting that 
