favourite place for their repose: the thick and varnished leaves of these trees prevents the radiation of heat from the soil, and they are less affected by the refrigerating influence of a clear sky, so that they afford a warm seat for the woodcock. Woodcocks usually begin to fly north on the first approach of spring, and their flights are generally longer, and their rests fewer, at this season than in the autumn. In the autumn they are driven from the north to the south by the want of food, and they stop wherever they can find food. In the spring, there is the influence of another powerful instinct added to this, the sexual feeling. They migrate in pairs, and pass as speedily as possible to the place where they are likely to find food, and to raise their young, and of which the old birds have already had the experience of former years. Scarcely any woodcocks winter in any part of Germany. In France there are a few found, particularly in the southern provinces, and in Normandy and Brittany. The woods of England, especially of the west and south, contain always a certain quantity of woodcocks, but there are far more in the moist soil and warmer climate of Ireland; but in the woods of southern Italy and Greece, near marshes, they are far more abundant; and they extend in quantities over the Greek Islands, Asia Minor, and northern Africa. The snipe is one of the most generally distributed birds belonging to Europe. It feeds upon almost every kind of worm, or larvæ, and, as I have said before, its stomach sometimes contains seeds and rice; it prefers a country cold in the summer to breed in; but wherever there is much fluid water, and great morasses, this bird is almost certain to be found. Its nest is very inartificial, its eggs large, and the young ones soon become of an enormous size, being, often before they can fly, larger than their parents. Two young ones are usually the number in a nest, but I have seen three. The old birds are exceedingly attached to their offspring, and if any one approach near the nest they make a loud and drumming noise above the head, as if to divert the attention of the intruder. A few snipes always breed in the marshes of England and Scotland, but a far greater number retire for this purpose to the Hebrides and the Orkneys. In the heather surrounding a small lake in the Island of Hoy, in the Orkneys, I found in the month of August, in 1817, the nests of ten or twelve couple of snipes. I was grouse-shooting, and my dog continually pointed them, and, as there were sometimes three young ones and two old ones in the nest, the scent was very powerful. From accident of the season these snipes were very late in being hatched, for they usually fly before the middle of July; but this year, even as late as the 15th of August, there were many young snipes that had not yet their wing feathers. Snipes are usually fattest in frosty weather, which, I believe, is owing to this, that in such weather they