The life of Edward Jenner : naturalist, and discoverer of vaccination / by F. Dawtrey Drewitt.

  • Frederic George Dawtrey Drewitt
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The life of Edward Jenner : naturalist, and discoverer of vaccination / by F. Dawtrey Drewitt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    observation is, no doubt, correct. The late Lord Lilford, in his excellent account of the birds of Northamptonshire,1 writes : ‘ No one who has only seen these birds (land-rails) flushed from thick covert, with legs hanging, and ap¬ parently laboured flight for perhaps a hundred yards, would believe in their power of rapid, sustained, and lofty progress through the air ; but it has happened to us on one occasion to see a land-rail passing high over¬ head, apparently travelling for pleasure ; and again, we remember one of these birds that, having been flushed twice, fairly took the air, and went quite out of our sight at a great height, and with a speed equal to that of the ordinary flight of a Wild Duck.’ In Yarrell’s well-known History of British Birds2 it is related that a land-rail rested on a ship two hundred miles out in the Atlantic. Jenner shows that birds by their extraordinary sense of direction, return to the spot where they nested the previous year. He removed two claws from the feet of each of the swifts nesting in the roof of a farm-house. Next year he examined them when at roost, and found the marked birds nesting there. They returned the next year, and the year after. He believed the impulse for nesting in a place 1 Lilford : Birds of Northamptonshire, 1895, i. 318. 2 Yarrell’s History of British Birds, revised by Howard Saunders, edition 4, iii. 139.