136 SORICID^— NEOMYS 



in the water that this food is for the most part obtained. The 

 observations of a number of intelligent naturalists have afforded 

 many curious details as to its mode of life, and we now know 

 that it is not less interesting in its habits than elegant and 

 pleasing in its form and movements. 



The Water Shrew was evidently known to Merrett, but 

 appears to have been unnoticed by naturalists for about a 

 century afterwards, being absent from the earlier editions of 

 Pennant. It was eventually rediscovered almost simul- 

 taneously by Daubenton, who wrote a description of it 

 in 1756, in France, and by Pallas at Berlin.^ The latter 

 naturalist supplied Pennant with some unpublished prints of it 

 in 1765, and Pennant himself met with it at Revesby Abbey, 

 the Lincolnshire seat of Sir John Banks, in 1768.^ Thereafter 

 it became familiar to several of our early naturalists, includ- 

 ing Patrick Neill, its first observer for Scotland, in 1808,^ 

 George Montagu for Devonshire,* Fleming,^ and Sowerby. 

 These writers knew it well enough to fully appreciate its 

 vagaries of colour. Montagu, for instance, described a specimen 

 with the throat and breast ferruginous, while Fleming 

 commented on the dark markings of the under side and 

 upon the occurrence of an individual having a deep chest- 

 nut throat-band. Sowerby went a step farther and figured 

 under the name of ^. ciliatus a melanic specimen from Norfolk, 

 which Jenyns with his usual perspicacity perceived to be 

 specifically identical with ordinary S. fodiens of the same 

 district. Nevertheless he admitted to the British list another 



' In his Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica (1811, i., 130), Pallas states that he first 

 observed it "jam puer Ao. 1756 circa patriam urbem Berolinum." 



^ So far as I am aware, Pennant nowhere explicitly states that he personally 

 rediscovered the Water Shrew. But he was at Revesby Abbey in 1768, where, 

 according to his own Literary Life (1793), he made many discoveries, and he states 

 in his Synopsis of Quadrupeds^ 308 (Chester, 1771), that the species was lost in 

 England until "May 1768, when it was discovered in the fens near Revesby Abbey, 

 Lincolnshire." The evidence, although circumstantial only, is, therefore, conclusive, 

 even without Gilbert White's statement in his xxvith letter, dated 8th December 

 1769: — "De Buffon, I know, has described the water shrew-mouse: but still I am 

 pleased to find you have discovered it in Lincolnshire, . . ." 



^ In the 1808 edition of Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd^ i., 269, as pointed out 

 by W. Evans correcting E. R. Alston. 



* Linnean Transactions, vii., 276, 1804. 



^ Wernerian Society s Memoirs, ii., 238, 1812. 



