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It is hardly necessary to assert that “pheasant disease” as commonly seen in the rearing-fields is not fowl enteritis, as it is so often said to be, because the foster-mothers are hardly ever affected by any illness when their chicks are dying by hundreds of the disease. The pheasant disease has never been subjected to pathological examination and investigation.

To start at the beginning would make it necessary to state that the “muff ’cock,” or the bigger woodcock, that comes in a separate migration, is not the hen of the smaller birds, and that distinction can only be made between the sexes by internal examination of the organs. It might be necessary in similar circumstances to say that woodcock and snipe do not live on suction, as is often believed even now; that nightjars and hedgehogs neither suck the milk of goats nor cows; that foxes do not prefer rats and beetles to partridges and pheasants; that swallows do not hibernate at the bottom of ponds; that badgers do not prefer young roots to young rabbits; that ptarmigan and woodcock are not mute, and that the former do not live on either stones or heather; that badgers can run elsewhere than along the sides of a hill, and that they are not compelled, by having the legs on one side shorter than on the other, to always take this curious course, which would involve them in the difficulty of having to entirely encircle a hill before getting back to their holes; nevertheless, this faith is still held in some parts of the country, just as it is said that the heather bleating of the snipe is a vocal sound, whereas it is often made simultaneously with the vocal sound.