nd certainly the
whole of Ireland, out of its calculations. It is however well known that
its range is slowly but surely extending towards the west.

This curiously restricted distribution of the nightingale, indeed,
within the limits of its summer home is among the most remarkable of
the many problems confronting the student of distribution, and
successive ingenious but unconvincing attempts to explain its seeming
eccentricity, or at any rate caprice, in the choice of its nesting range
only make the confusion worse. Briefly, in spite of a number of doubtful
and even suspicious reports of the bird's occurrence outside of these
boundaries, it is generally agreed by the soundest observers that its
travels do not extend much north of the city of York, or much west of a
line drawn through Exeter and Birmingham. By way of complicating the
argument, we know, on good authority, that the nightingale's range is
equally peculiar elsewhere; and that, whereas it likewise shuns the
departments in the extreme west of France, it occurs all over the
Peninsula, a region extending considerably farther into the sunset than
either Brittany or Cornwall, in both of which it is unknown. No
satisfactory explanation of the little visitor's objection to Wild Wales
or Cornwall has been found, and it may at once be stated that its
capricious distribution cannot be accounted for by any known facts of
soil, climate, or vegetation, since the surroundings which it finds
suitable in Kent and Sussex are equally to be found down in the West
Country, but fail to attract their share of nightingales.

The song of the nightingale, in praise of which volumes have been
written, is perhaps more beautiful than that of any other bird, though I
have heard wonderful efforts from the mocking-bird in the United States
and from the bulbuls along the banks of the Jordan. The latter are
sometimes, more especially in poetry, regarded as identical with the
nightingale; and, indeed, some ornithologists hold the two to be closely
related. What a gap there is between the sobbing cadences of the
nightingale and the rasping note of the nightjar, which, with specific
reference to a Colonial cousin of that bird Tasmanians ingeniously
render as "more pork"! It seems almost ludicrous to include under the
head of birdsong not only the music of the nightingale, but also the
croak of the raven and the booming note of the ostrich. Yet these also
are the love-songs of their kind, and