others, this one gave me the best and longest view, and the only one of the descent. Had he fluttered in the ascent also, I must certainly have noted it, and I should not, then, have placed the two in such contradistinction. If an inference may be drawn from such limited observation, it, perhaps, is that this bird is in process of acquiring, or, at any rate, of perfecting, a habit, and that, therefore, all the individuals do not excel in it to an equal degree. The fact that I often watched and waited to see them practising the art again, but without success, may lend some colour to this. There was clinging sometimes, but not climbing."
In this competition, therefore, between the wren and the tit as tree-creepers, the tit bears off the bell; but later I had a better opportunity of observing the prowess of the latter bird, and, though I did not see it descend, yet in ease and deftness, length of time during which the part was assumed, and general fidelity of the understudy to the original, it must, I think, be pronounced the superior. It was early on a cold, rainy, cheerless morning towards the end of February, that I was so lucky as not to be in bed. I say—"Have, this morning, watched closely, and from quite near, a wren behaving just like a professional tree-creeper. It ascended the trunk of an alder, quickly and easily, and sometimes to a considerable height—twenty or thirty feet perhaps—beginning from the roots, and then flew down to the roots or base of the next one, and so on along a whole line of them. Up the sloping roots, or anywhere at all horizontal, it hopped along in the usual manner, but, when the trunk became perpendicular, it crept or crawled, just
