62 WHITE 



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 its eye and a tawny rump. 1 I 

 have surveyed it alive and dead, and have procured several 

 specimens, and am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you 

 will soon become convinced of the same) that it is no more nor 

 less than \kt 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 aviculce caudd unicolore, and 

 among your slender-billed small birds of the same division. 

 Linnaeus might with great propriety have put it into his genus 

 of motacilla; and motacilla salicaria of his fauna stiecica 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 country-people in some places call 

 it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and day during 

 the breeding time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a 

 skylark ; and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My 

 specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your 

 fen salicaria shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an ex- 

 cellent characteristic of it when he says, "Rostrum et pedes in 

 hac aviculd multb majores stint quam pro corporis rationed See 

 letter, May 29th, 1769. (Preceding letter, XXIV.) 



I have got you the egg of an cedicnemus, 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 se 

 defendendo. I knew a gentleman who kept a tame snake, 

 which was in its person as sweet as any animal while in good 

 humor and unal armed ; 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 supportable. Thus the 

 squnck, or stonck, of Ray's " Synop. Quadr." is an innocuous 

 and sweet animal ; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, 



