NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 6l 



NOTES 



1 The angler's may-fly, the ephemera vulgata LINN., comes forth from its 

 aurelia state, and emerges out of the water about six in the evening, and dies 

 about eleven at night, determining the date of its fly state in about five or 

 six hours. They usually begin to appear about the 4th June, and continue 

 in succession for near a fortnight. See Swaimnerdam^ Derham, Scopoli, 

 etc. G. W. 



2 Vagrant cuckoo ; so called because, being tied down by no incubation 

 or attendance about the nutrition of its young, it wanders without control. 

 G. W. 



8 Charadrius cedicnemus. G. W. 



4 Gry 'Hits campestris. G. W. 



5 In hot summer nights woodlarks soar to a prodigious height, and hang 

 singing in the air. G. W. 



6 The light of the female glow-worm (as she often crawls up the stalk of 

 a grass to make herself more conspicuous) is a signal to the male, which is a 

 slender dusky scarabceus. G. W. 



7 See the story of Hero and Leander. G. W. 



LETTER XXV 



SELBORNE, Aug. ysth, 1769. 



DEAR SIR, 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 southward ? Was not candor 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 ingenuousness 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 



