NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 73 
westward ; because I hear, from very good authority, that they 
breed on Dartmoor ; and that they forsake that wild district about 
the time that our visitors appear, and do not return till late in the 
spring. 
I have taken a great deal of pains about your sa/zcaréa and mine, 
with a white stroke over its eye and a tawnyrump. I have sur- 
veyed it alive and dead, and have procured several specimens, and 
am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will soon become 
convinced of the same) that it is no more nor less than the Passer 
avrundinaceus minor of Ray. This bird, by some means or other, 
seems to be entirely omitted in the British Zoology ; and one reason 
probably was because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who ranges 
it among his Pzczs affines. It ought no doubt to have gone among 
his avicule cauddé unicolore, and among your slender-billed small 
birds of the same division. Linnzeus might with great propriety 
have put it into his genus of motacilla; and motactlla salicaria of 
his fauna suectca seems to come the nearest to it. It is no uncom- 
mon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there is 
covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in 
some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and 
day during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a 
STONE-CURLEW’S EGG. 
swallow, a sky-lark ; and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. 
My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your 
Jen salicaria shot near Revesby.* Mr. Ray has given an excellent 
* This is the Salicaria phragmitis, the sedge- warbler, sedge-bird, or Reed fauvette of 
British authors. It is by far the most common and generally distributed of our native 
species of Sadicaria, and is distinct from that referred to in preveding letters. 
