OF SELBORNE. 7-5 



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 Dartmore ; 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 it's 'eye, and a tawny rump. I 

 have survovod 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 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 his picis 

 affines. It ought no doubt to have gone among his aviculw 

 caudd unicolore, and among your slender-billed small birds of 

 the same division. Linnceus might with great propriety have 

 put it into his genus of motacilla ; and the motacilla salicaria 

 of his fauna suecica seems to come the nearest to 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 coun- 

 try people in some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings in- 

 cessantly night and day during the breeding-time, imitating 

 the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a sky-lark ; and has a strange 

 hurrying manner in it's song. My specimens correspond most 

 minutely to the description of your fen salicaria shot near 

 Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent characteristic of 

 it when he says, " Rostrum fy pedes in hoc aviculd multb 

 major es sunt quarn pro corparis rationed See letter May 29, 

 1769. 



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 



