The Natural History of Se I borne 105 



I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and 

 mine, with a white stroke over its eye and a tawny rump. 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 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 Pici 

 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 ntotacilla; and 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 

 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 sky-lark; and has a 

 strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens corre- 

 spond most minutely to the description of your fen salicaria 

 shot near Revesby. * Mr. Ray has given an excellent char- 

 acteristic of it when he says, "Rostrum et pedes in hdc aviculd 

 multb majores sunt quam pro carports rationed 2 See letter, 

 May 29, 1769. 



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 

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

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

 humour and unalarmed ; but as soon as a stranger, or a dog 



1 This is the sedge- warbler, Acrocephalus phragmitis. ED. 2 The 



bill and feet in this bird are much too large to be proportionate with its 

 body.^ED. 



