Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BIRDS' NESTS |HE knowledge of all other aspects of bird-life, combined, gives no such feeling of intimate acquaintance and peculiar interest as is gained by following even the most familiar species, like the robin or sparrow, through the short period of nesting ; and this probably for the reason that this brief annual experience in their lives calls into action the most subtle, personal, and charming qualities of their nature. A bird, like a human being, is best known, after all, in the intimacies of its own home. Here it finds a warmer response from our own nature than even in the glow and ecstacy of its most delicious song. Here it is most nearly human, and affords most marked analogies of human wisdom, patience, solicitude and affection. And yet it is in the intricate and almost inaccessible details of their short family life that we still have most to learn concerning birds—a fund of problems giving infinite zest to every annual return of this, their period of exceeding joy, the time of their greatest hope, activity, and realization of their life. Nest and eggs are the two distinct factors in nidification, the interest in which is too apt to be monopolized by the eggs. The minute size, the elegant form so unique and graceful, the beautifully varied coloring, and, above all, the mysterious life-potency of an egg, invest it with the deeper interest that is reasonably felt for the gem, rather than for the casket that contains it. In many ways it is certainly the more important of the two; yet, in one respect—in the evidence of individuality, conscious exertion, and intelligence of the creature that fabricates it—the nest is a far more interesting and suggestive study. Moreover, the collecting of eggs involves in some cases an abstraction of just so much possible and...