His daily habit was to retire at eight and rise at three o'clock in the morning, and he was always dressed by four; an ardent Roman Catholic, he would spend an hour at devotion in his private chapel; he then read Latin and Spanish authors, wrote his polemics against Audubon or any others with whom he came in conflict, and received the reports of his bailiff, all before breakfast, which was at eight o'clock; the remainder of the day was mostly devoted to his birds and other animals, to preserve which he surrounded his entire estate with a high rampart of stone, said to have cost, all told, $50,000. Though a devout Romanist, as someone has remarked, Waterton never hesitated to adopt the same mode of reasoning which Hume had employed in his argument against miracles. Thus he rejected with scorn Edward Jenner's account of how the young parasitic Cuckoo, when but a day old and hardly able to stand, turned out of their nest its rightful occupants. This account, which was generally accepted then, and has been repeatedly verified and recorded by the camera since, "carries," said Waterton, "its own condemnation, no matter by whom related, or by whom received." Trusting to analogy again, he maintained that Audubon's description of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird gluing bits of lichen to the surface of its nest with saliva was false, because "the saliva of all birds immediately mixes with water," and the first shower of rain would immediately undo the work of the bird. No account was taken of the Chimney Swift, which not only glues together the twigs of its nest but secures the whole to a support through an abundant salivary secretion, although this habit had long been known. In the instance of this hummingbird, however, both Audubon and Waterton were partly right and partly wrong, as a careful examination of the nests of five species of hummingbirds, including the Ruby-throat, has clearly shown.[86] It proved that saliva was only casually used on the surface of the nest, the lichens in the case referred to being adherent by means of spiders' silk and fine vegetable fibers of various sorts; the saliva of the Ruby-throat, when dry, moreover, was found to be practically insoluble in cold water, even after an immersion of several days; but more interesting than this is the fact that the nest itself is _glued_ to its supporting twig by a large _salivary wafer_, which represents this hummingbird's first step in the work of nest construction.