for procuring their food. Their bills are made sufficiently long for searching; but still more, they are endowed with an exquisite sensibility at the point for feeling their provision. They are furnished with no less than three pair of nerves equal almost to the optic nerves in thickness, which pass from the roof of the mouth, and run along the upper chap to the point.

Nor are those birds with shorter bills, and destitute of such convenient instruments, without a proper provision made for their subsistence. The lapwing, the sand-piper, and the red-shank, run with surprising rapidity along the surface of the marsh, or the sea-shore, quarter their ground with great dexterity, and leave nothing of the insect kind that happens to lie on the surface. These, however, are neither so fat nor so delicate as the former: as they are obliged to toil more for a subsistence, they are easily satisfied with whatever offers; and their flesh often contracts a relish from what has been their latest or their principal food.

Most of the birds formerly described have stated seasons for feeding and rest-the eagle kind prowl by day, and at evening repose; the owl by night, and keeps unseen in the day-time. But these birds of the crane kind seem at all hours employed; they are seldom at rest by day, and during the whole night season every meadow and marsh resounds with their different calls to courtship or to food. This seems to be the time when they least fear interruption from man; and though they fly at all times, yet at this season they appear more assiduously employed, both in providing for their present support, and continuing that of posterity. This is usually the season when the insidious fowler steals in upon their occupations, and fills the whole meadow with terror and destruction.

As all of this kind live entirely in waters, and

among watery places, they seem provided by nature with a warmth of constitution to fit them for that cold element. They reside, by choice, in the coldest climates; and as other birds migrate here in our summer, their migrations hither are mostly in the winter. Even those that reside among us the whole season, retire in summer to the tops of our bleakest mountains, where they breed, and bring down their young when the cold weather sets in.

Most of them, however, migrate, and retire to the polar regions; as those that remain behind in the mountains, and keep with us during summer, bear no proportion to the quantity which in winter haunt our marshes and low grounds. The snipe sometimes builds here, and the nest of the curlew is sometimes found in the plashes of our hills; but the number of these is very small, and it is most probable that they are only some stragglers, who, not having strength or courage sufficient for the general voyage, take up from necessity their habitation here.

In general, during the summer this whole class either choose the coldest countries to retire to, or the coldest and the moistest part of ours to breed in. The curlew, the woodcock, the snipe, the godwit, the gray plover, the green, and the long-legged plover, the knot, and the turnstone, are rather the guests than the natives of this island. They visit us in the beginning of winter, and forsake us in the spring. They then retire to the mountains of Sweden, Poland, Prussia, and Lapland, to breed. Our country, during the summer season, becomes uninhabitable to them. The ground parched up by the heat, the springs dried away, and the vermicular insects already upon the wing, they have no means of subsisting. Their weak and delicately pointed bills are unfit to dig into a resisting soil, and their prey is departed though they were able to reach its retreats.

Thus, that season when nature is said to teem with life, and to put on her gayest liveries, is to them an interval of sterility and famine. The coldest mountains of the north are then a preferable habitation; the marshes there are never totally dried up, and the insects are in such abundance, that, both above ground and underneath, the country swarms with them. In such retreats, therefore, these birds would continue always, but that the frosts, when they set in, have the same effect upon the face of the landscape as the heats of summer. Every brook is stif fened into ice, all the earth is congealed into one solid mass, and the birds are obliged to forsake a region where they can no longer find subsistence.

Such are our visitants. With regard to those which keep with us continually, and breed here, they are neither so delicate in their food, nor perhaps so warm in their constitutions. The lap-wing, the ruff, the red-shank, the sandpiper, the sea-pie, the Norfolk plover, and the sea-lark, breed in this country, and for the most part reside here. In summer they frequent such marshes as are not dried up in any part of the year, the Essex hundreds, and the fens of Lincolnshire. There, in solitudes formed by surrounding_marshes, they breed and bring up their young. In winter they come down from their retreats, rendered uninhabitable by the flooding of the waters, and seek their food about our ditches and marshy meadow grounds. Yet even of this class all are wanderers upon some occasions, and take wing to the northern climates to breed and find subsistence. This happens when our summers are peculiarly dry, and when the fenny countries are not sufficiently watered to defend their retreats.

But though this be the usual course of nature with respect to these birds, they often break through the general habits of their kind; and as the lapwing, the

ruff, and the sandpiper, are sometimes seen to alter their manners, and to migrate from hence instead of continuing to breed here, so we often find the woodcock, the snipe, and the curlew, reside with us during the whole season, and breed their young in different parts of the country. In Casewood, about two miles from Tunbridge, as Mr. Pennant assures us, some woodcocks are seen to breed annually. The young have been shot there in the beginning of August, and were as healthy and vigorous as they were with us in winter, though not so well tasted. On the Alps and other high mountains, says Willoughby, the woodcock continues all summer. I myself have flushed them on the top of Mount Jura in June and July. The eggs are long, of a pale red colour, and stained with deeper spots and clouds. The nests of the curlew and the snipe are frequently found; and some of these, perhaps, never entirely leave this island.

It is thus that the same habits are, in some measure, common to all; but in nestling and bringing up their young, one method takes place universally. As they all run and feed upon the ground, so they are all found to nestle there. The number of eggs generally to be seen in every nest, is from two to four; never under, and very seldom exceeding. The nest is made without any art; but the eggs are either laid in some little depression of the earth, or on a few bents and long grass, that scarcely preserve them from the moisture below. Yet such is the heat of the body of these birds, that their time of incubation is shorter than with any others of the same size. The magpie, for instance, takes twenty-one days to hatch its young; the lapwing takes but fourteen. Whether the animal oil, with which these birds abound, gives them this superior warmth, I cannot tell; but there is no doubt of their quick incubation.

In their seasons of courtship they pair as other birds, but not without violent contests between the males for the choice of the female. The lapwing and the plover are often seen to fight among themselves; but there is one little bird of this tribe, called the Ruff, that has got the epithet of the fighter, merely from its great perseverance and animosity on these occasions. In the beginning of spring, when these birds arrive among our marshes, they are observed to engage with desperate fury against each other: it is then that the fowlers, seeing them intent on mutual destruction, spread their nets over them, and take them in great numbers. Yet even in captivity their animosity still continues: the people that fat them up for sale are obliged to shut them up in close dark rooms; for if they let ever so little light in among them, the turbulent prisoners instantly fall to fighting with each other, and never cease till each has killed its antagonist, especially, says Willoughby, if any body stands by. A similar animosity, though in a less degree, prompts all this tribe; but when they have paired and begun to lay, their contentions are then over.

The place these birds chiefly choose to breed in is in some island surrounded with sedgy moors, where men seldom resort; and in such situations I have of ten seen the ground so strewed with eggs and nests, that one could scarcely take a step without treading upon some of them. As soon as a stranger intrudes upon these retreats, the whole colony is up, and a hundred different screams are heard from every quarter. The arts of the lapwing to allure men or dogs from her nest are perfectly amusing. When she perceives the enemy approaching, she never waits till they arrive at her nest, but boldly runs to meet them: when she has come as near them as she dares to venture, see then rises with a loud screaming before them,