Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Architecture of Birds: With Engravings
In the account which the observant boy subjoins of his interesting ramble (the other had nothing to tell) over the heath and the meadows, it is remark able that Birds constitute more than two-thirds of his story. He saw a wheat-ear hopping about a pile of stones; a ?ock of lapwings throwing their fantastic somersets in the air, and one of them tumbling along as if her wing had been broken to lure him from her nest; he saw a king-fisher with its splendid plumage of green, orange, and blue, darting after fish in the brook, along the margin of which a family of sand pipers were hunting down aquatic insects, while some swallows which skimmed along on the wing were ready to dart u on the ?ies which escaped from these swift-footed pedhstrians; he saw bank-swallows bur rowing in the bank to shelter their nests from bad weather and worse enemies; he saw a heron take her patient stand at a bend of the river to watch for a passing fish, and, after a successful capture, ?y 06' with her prey to her nest in the woods; and he saw a troop of starlings as numerous as a swarm of bees, the same phenomenon which nearly three thousand years before had a?'orded Homer a fine poetical for a heap of fugitive warriors. So it is, ' the narra tive concludes one man walks through the world with his eyes open, and another with them shut; and open this difference depends all the superiority. Of knowledge the one acquires above the other.'
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