NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 83 



LETTER XXV. 



SELBORNE, Aug. y>fh, 1769. 



DEAR SIR, It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of 

 the ousel migration pleases you. You put a very shrewd question 

 when you ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is 

 southward ? Was not candour and openness the very life of 

 natural history, I should pass over this query just as a sly com- 

 mentator does over a crabbed passage in a classic ; but common 

 ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of 

 shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as 

 all other autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to 

 partake of our milder winters, and return to the northward again 

 when the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels 

 did the same, as well as their congeners the fieldfares ; and 

 especially as ring-ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous 

 countries : but I have good reason to suspect since that they may 

 come to us from the 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 salicaria and 

 mine, with a white stroke over its eye and a tawny rump. 1 I have 

 surveyed 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 arundinaceus 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 \i\s_picis affines. It ought no doubt to have 

 gone among his avicultz cauda unicolore, and among your slender- 

 billed small birds of the same division. Linnaeus might with 

 great propriety have put it into his genus of motacilla ; and mota- 

 cilla salicaria of \i\sfauna suecica seems to come the nearest to it. 

 It is no uncommon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers 



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