Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/809

Rh have been familiar with the habits of the birds of passage from the dawn of history; but most of the best literature on the subject is by northern ornithologists, and the home of the writer has had and still has great influence on opinion as to the meaning and origin of the migratory habit. Scandinavians and Saxons and Anglo-Saxons are home-loving folk, who, in all their wanderings through this world of care, keep a warm affection for the fatherland.

A learned professor in the University of Upsala once wrote a book to prove that the garden of Eden was in Sweden, by the simple argument that no one who knows the delights of that blessed country can believe paradise could have been anywhere else. He showed that the Atlantis of Plato, the country of the hyperboreans, the garden of the Hesperides, the Fortunate Islands, and the Elysian Fields are but faint and imperfect reminiscences of the lovely and favored climes of Sweden, from which the Greeks themselves derived their alphabet, their astronomy, and their religion.

To men of the north, home seems the natural refuge of the birds, and, as much of the literature of migration is northern, the birthplaces of common birds have been regarded as their true or natural homes, and while their disappearance in winter has seemed to call for explanation, their return in summer has been looked at as a matter of course, for the intense love of home which many birds have has seemed enough to draw them back as soon as winter is over. It is the "homing" instinct which makes the carrier pigeon so useful to man; and one of the most impressive features of the migratory habit is the definiteness of the journey northward, which often ends in a particular bush or ledge of rocks. Many of our common birds lay their eggs year after year in the same nest, although they spend part of the year in the heart of a foreign country thousands of miles away, and although the surroundings of the chosen spot may have changed so much that it is no longer a judicious selection. A bottle in the branches of a tree at Oxbridge, in England, is known to have been occupied every year, with only one exception, since 1785, by a pair of blue titmice; and on a hill in Finland, well known to tourists as the most northern point in Europe where the sun can be seen at midnight, a nest is said to have been occupied by a pair of peregrine falcons every year since 1736. Many like cases are recorded, and while it is not probable that the birds which visit a nest year after year for centuries are the same, the fact is all the more remarkable if they belong to successive generations.

According to folklore, some of the summer birds hide near home through the winter, and Cams, in his History of Zoölogy, refers to several learned writers who, early in the seventeenth century, quoted from the older literature much venerable authority for the belief