which he is endowed, he will with little or no deviation find his way directly back to the home from which he had been taken. A friend of mine, not a little remarkable for the vigour and activity both of his mind and body, described to me the horrible sensations he experienced on one occasion, when he had wandered into the woods near his residence in Nova Scotia, and suddenly found he was unable to extricate himself. He ascended trees-he went here and there, and every step he took seemed to plunge him deeper into the recesses of the forest. He told me that he felt like one in the midst of a vast desert, without compass or guide, and perfectly unconscious of the way he should direct his steps. He had nothing but death before him. The recollection of his wife, his children, and his friends, roused him to fresh exertions. But the faculties both of his mind and body became more and more enervated, and he was on the point of yielding to that despair, which on such occasions generally terminates in madness, when a trifling object which he had previously noticed, made him aware of the locality of his situation. He was thus able to find his way home. Under similar circumstances, the instinct possessed by a savage, or by a horse, a dog, a pig, or indeed by any other of the lower animals, would have led them probably in one unerring line to the place which they had been in the

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habit of frequenting. May we not infer therefore than a beneficent Creator, who watches unceasingly over all his creatures, and who tempers 'the storm to the shorn lamb,' has thought proper to endow the poor untutored savage, as well as the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air, with faculties which he has denied to man in his more rational and cultivated state of being? The most minute of our birds, our tender feeble warblers, even the bee which leaves its hive for the first time and passes through the air, as it is known to do, to collect honey many miles from its home,

Steering his distant journey through the skies-'

all these, and many others, possess an instinct so wonderful, that we are incapable either of explaining or accounting for it.

I was led into these reflections on receiving an account of the following extraordinary fact in Natural History, which was communicated to me by an officer of rank in the British Army. He informed me that a ship, which touched at the Island of Ascension on her way to England, took in several large turtle, and amongst others, one, which from some accident, had only three fins. It was in consequence called, and known on board the ship by the name of the Lord Nelson.' It was marked in the usual way by having certain

EXTRAORDINARY INSTANCE IN A TURTLE. 77

initials and numbers burnt upon its under shell with a hot iron, and which marks are known never to be obliterated. Owing to various causes, the ship was a long time on her passage homewards, a circumstance which occasioned many of the turtle to die, and most of the rest were very sickly. This was the case with the Lord Nelson,' and it was so nearly dead, when the ship arrived in the channel, that the sailors, with whom it was a favourite, threw it overboard, in order as they said to give it a chance. Its native element, however, appears to have revived it, for two years afterwards the very same turtle was again taken at its old haunt on the Island of Ascension. The proofs brought forward of the accuracy of the statement, place its authenticity beyond a doubt, and it affords a most extraordinary instance of the wonderful instinct possessed by animals. When we consider the vast tract of waters this turtle had to pass through, and that the Island of Ascension is only a little speck in the mighty ocean, it is impossible not to reflect with wonder upon that unexplained instinct which enabled so unwieldy, and apparently so stupid an animal, to find its way back to its former haunts.

There is another wonderful faculty possessed by birds, and probably by animals generally. I mean that of discovering places where food is most abundant, though situate far distant from

the spot they had previously occupied. When mice encreased so rapidly in Dean Forest, that they threatened the destruction of the young plantations, and indeed did destroy some of them, birds of prey encreased in proportion. Hawks, owls, and other birds which had not before been known in the neighbourhood, came there in great abundance; and one variety of owl was found there, which had not been seen in the country previous to the appearance of the mice.

I have been assured on the authority of a respectable clergyman residing near Worthing in Sussex, that the Beccafico annually visits the fig orchard near that place. This is the more extraordinary, as I believe the bird is found in no other part of England. It arrives in the fig orchard in a lean state, just as the figs are ripening, but it soon becomes a lump of fat. It is curious that these birds should perform so long a migration for the purpose of feeding upon figs in one solitary orchard in this country, for I have heard of no other. The Worthing fishermen say that they often alight on their boats when at sea, in an exhausted state. They also assure me that the tit-mouse sometimes does the same, which shews it to be a migratory bird.

That peculiar impulse which induces an animal on a sudden to quit one place for another far distant, which he had never previously visited,

is one of those facts which it is more difficult to account for than perhaps any other. Snakes, for instance, will go to considerable distances by water, and will cross even an arm of the sea. A nobleman residing in this neighbourhood informed me, that in passing in his boat between Cowes in the Isle of Wight and the Hampshire Coast, he saw a large snake swimming boldly across that channel. The boatmen assured him that they had frequently witnessed the same circumstance. The fact is also corroborated by Mr. Slight, a Surgeon at Portsmouth. In a letter to Mr. Loudon he says, that a fisherman brought him a snake (Coluber Natrix) which he had caught in his net while fishing in Haslar Lake, one of the branches of Portsmouth Harbour. And on the following morning, he adds, a seaman brought him a second alive and healthy, which had been just caught from the tide, or landing place, at Portsmouth. In a subsequent communication made to Mr. Loudon from another quarter, it would appear that snakes are frequently seen swimming across the Menai, to and from the Isle of Anglesea, and that they are the common snake of this country. A curious instance, is also mentioned of an adder having seized the artificial fly of an angler in one of the lakes of Scotland, on the verge of the estuary of a river. Snakes swim with great vigour, and the fact of