CORRESPONDENCE OF RAY. Ill 



about Montpellier ; but I have found it in divers places 

 in England since ^my return, in Kent, in Lincolnshire, 

 here at Oglethorpe, in a woody bank, upon the wharf 

 plentifully near the paper-mills. The Patella fluviatilis 

 you mention is a curious discovery, and is wholly new to 

 me ; I shall look for it here if perchance it may be found 

 in these parts. 



York, October, 1674. 



Dr. LISTER to Mr. RAY. 



DEAR FRIEND, I had a letter from the Barbadoes 

 from a"foarned and ingenious physician of that island the 

 other week ; he practised long in Cleveland, and, in his 

 passage this summer to the Barbadoes, gives me an 

 account of two birds he met with at sea. I thought to 

 ask your opinion of them. I shall transcribe that part of 

 Dr. Town's letter to me that mentions those birds : 



" One night, when the mariners were disagreeing about 

 our distance from Barbadoes, a bird, by the seamen usu- 

 ally called a Booby [Pelecanus sula], lighted upon a man 

 sleeping on the quarter-deck, which, from its stupidness 

 has its name, for it sat very quietly looking about it until 

 it was taken by a seaman's hands ; and by the cry of 

 this (which is like, and almost as loud as the sound a 

 buck makes upon the rut) immediately came another 

 Booby, which was taken after the same manner. And 

 many more might have been so taken, the seamen said, 

 had there been more about the ship ; but they were wel- 

 come guests, because they put us out of doubt, as usually 

 appearing about forty or fifty leagues from land. They 

 are of no beauty at all, yet I will send them to you, 

 because they are great enemies to the flying-fish. As soon 

 as we crossed the tropic we were met by a bird called the 

 Tropic-bird [Phaeton tetliereus], because they commonly 

 are first seen at twenty-two or twenty-three degrees of 

 latitude. They are about the bigness of a parrot; the 



