Whitethroat 



LETTER XXV. 



To the same. 



SKLBORNE, Aug. 30^, 1769. 

 EAR 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 candour 

 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 about the time that our visitors appear, and do not 

 return till late in the spring. 



