-hearting, and not return. You remark that your
'hedgehogs soon disappeared.' No doubt, unless confined by a wall.... A
garden, well fenced by a wall high enough to keep dogs out, is a capital
place for hedgehogs. But there ought always to be two, man and wife....
The windhover (or kestrel) hawk is excellent for killing beetles, and also
for consuming slugs and snails; cats dare not attack him, wherefore he is
very fit for a garden." We have not heard whether any effect has been
produced by Mr Waterton's remonstrances against the edict of extermination
fulminated against his sable friends the rooks--but we fear that farmers
in all countries are much on a par with those Delaware colonists and Isle
of Bourbon planters, whose fate he adduces as a warning. Having destroyed
their grakles, on a similar charge to that on which sentence has now been
passed on the rooks, they lost their whole crops by insects, and were
compelled not only to re-introduce the grakles, but to protect them by
law. We trust that the Scotch farmers will not be obliged, by a similar
calamity, to avail themselves of Mr Waterton's obliging offer to send
them, in case of such necessity, a fresh supply of these "useful and
interesting birds."

Mr Waterton never loses an opportunity of showing his contempt for the
modern systems of ornithology, which, by their complicated nomenclature,
eternally changed by every new sciolist, have almost succeeded in
converting that fascinating science into an unintelligible jargon of hard
names. "As I am not a convert to the necessity or advantages of giving to
many of our British birds these new and jaw-breaking names, I will content
myself with the old nomenclature, so well-known to every village lad
throughout the country.... The ancients called the wren _troglodytas_; but
it is now honoured with the high-sounding name of _Anorthura_, alleging
for a reason, that the ancients were quite mistaken in their supposition
that this bird was an inhabitant of caves, as it is never to be seen
within them. Methinks that the ancients were quite right, and that our
modern masters in ornithology are quite wrong. If we only for a moment
reflect that the nest of the wren is spherical, and is of itself, as it
were, a little cave, we can easily imagine that the ancients, on seeing
the bird going in and out of this artificial cave, considered the word
_troglodytas_ an appropriate appellation."

Among the various feathered visitants attrac