86 THE NATURAL HISTORY [LETT. 



it. It is no uncommon 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, imi- 

 tating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark, and has a 

 strange hurrying msinner in its song. My specimens correspond 

 most minutely to the description of your feu-salicaria shot near 

 Revesby. Mr. Hay has given an excellent characteristic of it 

 Avheii he says, " Rostrum d pedcs in hdc aviculd multb majores 

 sunt quam pro corporis rationed " The beak and feet of this 

 little bird are much too large for its body." 



I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stone-curlew, 

 which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground : there 

 were two; but the finder inadvertently crushed one with his 

 foot before he saw them. 



When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had not 

 forgot to mention the faculty that snakes have of stinking to 

 defend themselves, se dtfendendo. I knew a gentleman who 

 kept a tame snake, which was in its person as sweet as any 

 animal while in good humour and uiialariued ; but as soon as a 

 stranger, or a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and filled the 

 room with such nauseous effluvia as rendered it hardly sup- 

 portable. Thus the skunck, or stonck, of Eay's Synop. Quadr., 

 is an innocuous and sweet animal ; but, when pressed hard by 

 dogs and men, it can eject such a most pestilent and fetid smell 

 and excrement, than which nothing can be more horrible. 



A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the Lanius 

 minor cincrascens cum macula in scapulis alba, Kaii ; which is a 

 bird that, at the time of your publishing your two first volumes 

 of British Zoology, I find you had not seen. You have described 

 it well from Edwards's drawing. 



SELBORNE, Aug. 30, 1769. 



