fifi . THE NATURAL HISTORY [LETT. 



of the season may have quickened the emigration of the curlews 

 this year. 



They spend the day in high elevated fields and sheep-walks ; 

 but seem to descend in the night to streams and meadows, 

 perhaps for water, which their upland haunts do not afford 

 them.] OBSERVATIONS ON NATURE. 



And here will be the properest place to mention, while I 

 think of it, an anecdote which the above-mentioned gentleman 

 told me when I was last at his house ; which was that, in a 

 warren joining to his outlet, many daws (Corvi monedulce) build 

 every year in the rabbit-burrows under ground. The way he 

 and his brothers used to take their nests, while they were boys, 

 was by listening at the mouths of the holes; and if they heard 

 the young ones cry, they twisted the nest out with a forked 

 stick. Some water-fowls (viz. the puffins) breed, I know, in 

 that manner ; but I should never have suspected the daws of 

 building in holes on the flat ground. 



Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place 

 to breed in, and that is Stouehenge. These birds deposit their 

 nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost 

 stones of that amazing work of antiquity : which circumstance 

 alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, that 

 they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the 

 annoyance of shepherd boys, who are always idling round 

 that place. 



One of my neighbours last Saturday, November the 26th, saw 

 a martin in a sheltered bottom : the sun shone warm, and the 

 bird was hawking briskly after flies. I am now perfectly satisfied 

 that they do not all leave this island in the winter. 



You judge very right, I think, in speaking with reserve and 

 caution concerning the cures done by toads; for, let people advance 

 what they will on such subjects, yet there is such a propensity in 

 mankind towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot 

 safely relate anything from common report, especially in print, 

 without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion. 



Your approbation, with regard to my new discovery of the 

 migration of the ring-ousel, gives me satisfaction ; and I find 

 you concur with ine in suspecting that they are foreign birds 



