hat he had seen a
crow blackbird catch a small fish and fly away with it in its beak.
Now I have never seen anything of the kind, but I know of no principle
upon which I should feel disposed to question the truth of such an
assertion. I have myself seen a crow blackbird kill an English
sparrow. Both proceedings I think are very unusual, but neither is
antecedently improbable. If the professor had said that he saw the
blackbird dive head first into the water for the fish, after the
manner of the kingfisher, I should have been very skeptical. He only
saw the bird rise up from the edge of the water with the wriggling
fish in its mouth. It had doubtless seized it in shallow water near
the shore. But I should discredit upon general principles the
statement of the woman who related with much detail how she and her
whole family had seen a pair "of small brown birds" carry their
half-fledged young from their nest in a low bush, where there was
danger from cats, to a new nest which they had just finished in the
top of a near-by tree! Could any person who knows the birds credit
such a tale? The bank-teller throws out the counterfeit coin or bill
because his practiced eye and touch detect the fraud at once. On
similar grounds the experienced observer rejects all such stories as
the above. Darwin quotes an authority for the statement that our
ruffed grouse makes its drumming sound by striking its wings together
over its back. A recent writer says the sound is not made with the
wings at all, but is made with the voice, just as a rooster crows.
Every woodsman knows that neither statement is true, and he knows it,
not on general principles, but from experience--he has seen the grouse
drum.

Birds that are not flycatchers sometimes take insects in the air; they
do it clumsily, but they get the bug. On the other hand, flycatchers
sometimes eat fruit. I have seen the kingbird carry off raspberries.
All such facts are matters of observation. In the search for truth we
employ both the deductive and the inductive methods; we deduce
principles from facts, and we test alleged facts by principles.

The other day an intelligent woman told me this about a canary-bird:
The bird had a nest with young in the corner of her cage; near by were
some other birds in a cage--I forget what they were; they had a full
view of all the domestic affairs of the canary. This publicity she
evidently did not like, for she tore out of the paper that covered the
b