XXVI.] 



OF SELBORNE. 



85 



LETTER XXVI. 

 TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. 



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 south- 

 ward ? Was not candour and openness the very life of natural 

 history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commentator 

 does over a crabbed passage in a classic ; but common ingenuous- 

 ness 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. 



1 have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and 

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

 have surveyed it alive and dead, and have procured several 

 specimens ; and am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you 

 will soon be convinced of the same) that it is neither more nor 

 less than the Passer arundinaceas min'jr of Hay. 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 Kay, who ranges it among his Pici affiiies. It ought 

 no doubt to have gone among his small birds with the tail of 

 one colour (Avivulce caudd unicolore), and among your slender- 

 billed birds of the same division. Linnaeus might, with great pro- 

 priety, have put it into his genus of motacilla, and the Motacilla 

 salicaria of his " Fauna Suecica " seems to come the nearest to 



