Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/580

546 quantities. England was formerly supplied by Lincolnshire and Norfolk with abundance of the common cranberry, which it now largely imports from Sweden and Russia. The fruit is much used for pies and tarts, and also for making an acid summer beverage. The Mount Ida berry, cowberry, or red whortleberry, Vaccinium Vitis idcea, is sometimes sold for the cranberry. The Tasmanian and the Australian cranberries are the produce respectively of Asfroloma humifusum and Lissanthe sapida, plants of the order Epacridacece.

1em  CRANBROOK, a town of England, in the county of Kent, six miles south of the Staplehurst station, on tho South-Eastern Railway. It has a fins church dedicated to St Dunstan, which is remarkable for a baptistery in which the ceremony used to be administered by immersion. As the central town of the agricultural district called the Weald of Kent, it carries on a pretty extensive trade in malt, hops, and general goods ; but its present condition is in striking contrast to the activity it displayed from the 1 4th to the 17th century, when it was one of the principal seats of the broadcloth manufacture. In the neighbourhood are the ruins of the old mansion house of Sissinghurst, or Saxen- liurst, built by Sir John Baker in the time of Edward VI., and interesting as the birthplace of Sir Richard Baker the chronicler. Population of the parish in 1871, 4331.  CRANE (in Dutch, Kraan; Old German, Krœn; cognate, as also the Latin Grus, and consequently the French Grue and Spanish Grulla, with the Greek [ Greek text ]), the Grus communis or G. cinerea of ornithologists, one of the largest Wading-birds, and formerly a native of England, where Turner, in 1544, said that he had very often seen its young (&quot; earum, pipiones scepissime vidi&quot;). Notwith standing the protection afforded it by sundry Acts of Parliament, it has long since ceased from breeding in this country. Sir T. Browua (ob. 1682) speaks of it as being found in the open parts of Norfolk in winter. In Ray s time it was only known as occurring at the same season in large flocks in the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire ; and though mention is made of Cranes eggs and young in the fen-laws passed at a court held at Revesby in 1780, this was most likely but the formal repetition of an older edict ; for in 17G8 Pennant wrote that after the strictest inquiry ha found the inhabitants of those counties to be wholly unacquainted with the bird, and hence concluded that it had forsaken oar island. The Crane, however, no doubt then appeared in Britain, as it does now, at uncertain inter vals and in unwonted places, showing that the examples occurring here (which usually meet the hostile reception commonly accorded to strange visitors) have strayed from the migrating bands whose movements have been remarked from almost the earliest ages. Indeed, the Crane s aerial journeys are of a very extended kind ; and on its way from beyond the borders of the Tropic of Cancer to within the Arctic Circle, or on the return-voyage, its flocks may be descried passing overhead at a marvellous height, or Lilting for rest and refreshment on the wide meadows that border some great river, while the seeming order with which its ranks are marshalled during flight has long attracted attention. The Crane takes up its winter-quarters under the- burning sun of Central Africa and India, but early in epring returns northward. Not a few examples reach the chill polar soils of Lapland and Siberia, but some tarry in the south of Europe and breed in Spain, and, it is supposed, in Turkey. The grsater number, however, occupy the in termediate zone and pass the summer in Russia, North Germany, and Scandinavia. Soon after their arrival in these countries the flocks break up into pairs, whose nuptial ceremonies are accompanied by loud and frequent trumpet- ings, and the respective breeding-places of each are chosen. The nest is formed with little art on the ground in largo open marshes, where the herbage is not very high a toler ably dry spot being selected and used apparently year after year. Here the eggs, which are of a rich brown colour with dark spots, and always two in number, are laid. The young are able to run soon after they are hatched, and are at first clothed with tawny down. In the course of the summer they assume nearly the same /ey plumage that their parents wear, except that the elongated plumes, which in the adults form a graceful covering of the hinder parts of the body, are comparatively undeveloped, and the clear black, white, and red (the last being clue to a patch of papillose skin of that colour) of the head and neck are aa yet indistinct. During this time they keep in the marshes, but as autumn approaches the different families unite by the rivers and lakes, and ultimately form the enormous bands which after much more trumpeting set out on their southward journey. The Crane s power of uttering the sonorous and peculiar trumpet-like notes, of which mention has been made, is commonly and perhaps correctly ascribed to the formation of its trachea, which on quitting the lower end of the neck passes backward between the branches of the furcula and is received into a hollow space formed by the bony walls of the carina or keel of the sternum. Herein it makes threo turns, and then runs upwards and backwards to the lungs. The apparatus on the whole much resembles that found in the Whooping Swans (Cygnus rmisicus, C. buccinator, and others), though differing in some not unimportant details ; but at the same time somewhat similar convolutions of tho trachea occur in other birds which do not possess, so far as is known, the faculty of trumpeting. The Crane emits its notes both during flight and while on the ground. In the latter case the neck and bill are uplifted and the mouth kept open during the utterance of the blast, which may bo often heard from birds in confinement, especially at tho beginning of the year. As usually happens in similar cases, the name of tho once familiar British species is now used in a general sense, and applied to all others which are allied to it. Though by many systematists placed near or even among tho Herons, there is no doubt that the Cranes have only a superficial resemblance and no real affinity to the Ardeida, In fact the Gruidce form a somewhat isolated group. Professor Huxley has included them together with the Kallidce in his Geranomorphce ; but a more extended view of their various characters would probably assign them rather as relatives of the Bustards not that it must bo thought that the two families have not been for a very long time distinct. Grus, indeed, is a very ancient form, its remains appearing in the Miocene of France and Greece, as well as in the Pliocene and Post-pliocene of North America. In France, too, during the &quot; Reindeer Period &quot; there existed a huge species the G. primigenia of M. Alphonse Milue-Edwards which has doubtless been long extinct. At the present time Cranes inhabit all the great zoogeographical Regions of the earth, except the Neotropical, and some sixteen or seventeen species are dis criminated. In Europe, besides the G. communis already mentioned, we have as an inhabitant that which is generally known as the Numidian or Demoiselle-Crane (G. virffo), distinguished from every other by its long white ear-tufts. This bird is also widely distributed throughout Asia and Africa, and is said to have occurred in Orkney as a straggler. The eastern part of the Palsearctic Region is inhabited by four other species that do not frequent Europe ((?. antlgone, G. japonensis, G. monachus, and G. 