ngly alive and widely awake to the manifold delights and advantages
with which the study of Natural History swarms, and especially that
branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral,
and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable
creatures--Birds. It is familiar not only with the shape and colour of
beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they
are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the
beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the
very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed
company; when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-the-way but
amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child, who
does not know a hawk from a handsaw, or even, to adopt the more learned
reading, from a heron-shew; a black swan is no longer erroneously
considered a _rara avis_ any more than a black sheep; while the Glasgow
Gander himself, no longer apocryphal, has taken his place in the
national creed, belief in his existence being merely blended with wonder
at his magnitude, and some surprise perhaps among the scientific that he
should be as yet the sole specimen of that enormous Anser.

The chief cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most
delightful departments, has been the gradual extension of its study from
stale books written by men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of
God. And the second--another yet the same--has been the gradual change
wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and
arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant,
and which it exhibits in the most perfect harmony and order. Neophytes
now range for themselves, according to their capacities and
opportunities, the fields, woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and
proficients, no longer confining themselves to mere nomenclature, enrich
their works with anecdotes and traits of character, which, without
departure from truth, have imbued bird-biography with the double charm
of reality and romance.

Compare the intensity and truth of any natural knowledge insensibly
acquired by observation in very early youth, with that corresponding to
it picked up in later life from books! In fact, the habit of
distinguishing between things as different, or of similar forms,
colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood,
in a free intercourse and communio