38 WHITE 



Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say that 

 goats breathe at their ears ; whereas he asserts just the con- 

 trary : " 'AXtepauop yap ovtc a\r)6rj Xe^ei, (/xz/uez'o? avajrveiv ra? 

 alyds Kara TO, &TO," "Alcmaeon does not advance what is true, 

 when he avers that goats breathe through their ears." " His- 

 tory of Animals." Book I., chap, xi. 1 



NOTE 



1 Naturalists seem now agreed that the curious slits referred to in the 

 foregoing chapter are not and cannot be used for breathing, but for some 

 other sense of which we can but guess the nature. G. C. D. 



LETTER XV 



SELBORNE, March y>th, 1768. 



DEAR SIR, Some intelligent country people have a notion 

 that we have in these parts a species of the genus mustelinum, 

 besides the weasel, stoat, ferret, and polecat ; a little reddish 

 beast, not much bigger than a field-mouse, but much longer, 

 which they call a cane. This piece of intelligence can be little 

 depended on ; but farther inquiry may be made. 1 



A gentleman in this neighborhood had two milkwhite rooks 

 in one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them before they 

 were able to fly, threw them down and destroyed them, to the 

 regret of the owner, who would have been glad to have pre- 

 served such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw the birds myself 

 nailed against the end of a barn, and was surprised to find that 

 their bills, legs, feet, and claws were milkwhite. 



A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a 

 down above my house this winter : were not these the Em- 

 beriza nivalis, the snow-flake of the Brit. Zool. ? No doubt 

 they were. 



A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which had 

 been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colors. 

 In about a year it began to look dingy ; and, blackening every 

 succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its 

 chief food was hempseed. Such influence has food on the 

 color of animals ! The pied and mottled colors of domesticated 



