96 NATURAL HISTORY 
investigating the works of nature. You must have 
made, no doubt, many discoveries, and laid up a 
good fund of materials for a future edition of the 
British Zoology, and will have no reason to repent 
that you have bestowed so much pains on a part 
of Great Britain that perhaps was never so well 
examined before. 
It has always been matter of wonder to me that 
fieldfares, which are so congenerous to thrushes 
and blackbirds, should never choose to lay their 
eggs in England: but that they should not think 
even the Highlands cold and northerly, and seques- 
tered enough, is a circumstance still more strange 
and wonderful. The ringousel, you find, stays in 
Scotland the whole year round, so that we have 
reason to conclude that those migrators that visit 
us for a short space every autumn a not come 
from thence. 
And here, I think, will be the proper place to 
mention, that those birds were most punctual again 
in their migration this autumn, appearing, as before, 
about the 30th of September ; but their flocks were 
larger than common, and their stay protracted 
somewhat beyond the usual time. If they come to 
spend the whole winter with us, as some of their 
congeners do, and then left us as they do in spring, 
I should not be so much struck with the occurrence, 
since it would be similar to that of the other winter 
birds of passage ; but when I see them for a fort- 
night at Michaelmas, and again for about a week in 
the middle of April, I am seized with wonder, and 
long to be informed whence these travellers come, 
and whither they go, since they seem to use our 
hills merely as an inn or baiting-place. 
