Whttethroat 



LETTER XXV. 



'To the same. 



SELBORNE, Aug. ^Qth, 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 con- 

 geners 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. 



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 sur- 



