36 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. . 
teat to each? Perhaps she opens different places for that purpose, 
adjusting them again when the business is over; but she could not 
possibly be contained herself in the ball with her young, which 
moreover would be daily increasing in bulk. This wonderful pro- 
creant cradle, an elegant instance of the efforts of instinct, was 
found in a wheat-field suspended in the head of a thistle.* 
wl) 
Yin 
\ \ \NCe } i ANY’ 
HARVEST MICE. 
A gentleman, curious in birds, wrote me word that his servant 
had shot one last January, in that severe weather, which he believed 
would puzzle me. I called to see it this summer, not knowing what 
to expect, but the moment I took it in hand, I pronounced it the 
male garrulus bohemicus or German silk-tail, from the five peculiar 
crimson tags or points which it carries at the ends of five of the 
short remiges. It cannot, I suppose, with any propriety,’be called 
an English bird ; and yet I see, by Ray’s “ Philosophical Letters,” 
that great flocks of them, feeding on haws, appeared in this king- 
dom in the winter of 1685.+ 
* This is the harvest-mouse, us messovrius, of Shaw; and it is to Mr. White that we 
are indebted for the first notice and description of it as a British species, which he 
communicated to Mr. Pennant, who introduced it in the British zoology upon that 
authority. It is not unfrequent in some of the southern English counties, but becomes 
more rare northward. In Scotland it occasionally occurs, and on the authority of the 
late Professor Macgillivray, has been obtained in Aberdeenshire. It is the smallest of 
our British mammalia, and its habits are very interesting. 
The nests are very curious structures, and instead of being formed upon the ground, as 
those of most of the species, the ball or nest is suspended from the stems of grain or other 
high vegetation. One is described in the Memoir of Dr. Gloger. ‘‘ It was in skilfulness 
of construction fully equal to that of most birds, was suspended from the summit of three 
straws of the common reed (Arundo phragmites),and was entirely composed of the 
pannicles and leaves of the plants slit longitudinally, and intricately platted and matted 
together. Its internal cavity was small and round, and accessible only by a narrow 
lateral opening.” 
+ The letter alluded to was from Mr. Johnson to Mr. Ray,in 1686. ‘On the back-side 
