44 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



chief food was hemp-seed. Such influence has food on the colour 

 of animals!* The pied and mottled colours of domesticated ani- 

 mals are supposed to be owing to high, various, and unusual 

 food.f 



I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo- 

 pint (arum) was frequently scratched out of the dry 

 banks of hedges, and eaten in severe snowy weather. 

 After observing, with some exactness, myself, and 

 getting others to do the same, we found it was the 

 thrush kind that searched it out. The root of the 

 arum is remarkably warm and pungent. 



Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken 

 us. The blackbirds and thrushes are very much 

 thinned down by the fierce weather in January. 



In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall Cuckoo-pint, 

 hedges, a little bird that raised my curiosity : it was of that yellow- 

 green colour that belongs to the salicaria kind, and, I think, was soft- 

 billed. It was no parus , and was too long and too big for the 

 golden-crowned wren, appearing most like the largest willow- 

 wren. It hung sometimes with its back downwards, but never 



They are difficult to tame. Another species, the lark-heeled snow-fleck (P. lapponicd) , which 

 approximates still more towards the lark gsnus, has lately occurred two or three times in this 

 country (once in Sussex), and may be looked for among the heaps of dead larks which are 

 every winter exposed for sale in the markets; it is said to sing very like a linnet. ED. 



* Many species of small birds are liable to be thus affected by feeding much upon hemp-seed ; 

 among others, the field-lark and the wood-lark, but none perhaps so readily as the alp, or "bull- 

 finch" (pyrrhula vulgaris). Still it would appear that this diet is only a predisposing, not the 

 real cause of this change of colour, for I have known the small tropical amandavat (amandava 

 punctata? mi/it, fringilla amandava Linnaeus), of the bird-shops, to become wholly black when 

 fed entirely on Canary-seed. En. 



t The resemblance of most animals to the general hue of their indigenous locality is almost 

 too obvious to need exemplification. The wood-snipe is of the exact tint of the dead leaves over 

 which it runs, the snipe that of the marsh, and the rail that of coarse and decaying vegetation in 

 the ditch : " the ptarmigan," observes Mr. Mudie, and he might have added the mountain-hare 

 (/epiw Tnonfanws), "is lichened rock in summer, hoar frost in autumn, and snow in winter; 

 grouse (red ptarmigan) are brown heather, black-game are peat-bank and shingle, and partridges 

 are clods and withered stalks the whole year round." A provision of course intended to furnish 

 them with some means of eluding the piercing ken of their winged enemies. When creatures are 

 taken from their particular natural haunts, a disposition, in the next generation, to vary in hue 

 is commonly evinced more or less, according to the species ; efforts, as it were, of nature to ac- 

 commodate the offspring to the change ; and so remarkable is this in some species, that the 

 breeders of white and pied pheasants declare that albino or mottled individuals may almost 

 always be raised from an ordinarily coloured pair, by merely confining the latter in a room white- 

 washed, or splashed with whitening. Cattle have a great disposition to associate in pairs, so much 

 so that graziers are well aware that oxen will rarely fatten, unless stalled in winter next to their 

 favourite companion ; and it has been observed that a cow's first calf much more frequently re- 

 sembles its female companion than it does the sire, however different in colour these may be. To 

 follow out this subject in its various bearings, would far exceed the limits of a note, but 1 may 

 here further observe, in conclusion, that, were Jacob's curious experiments to be tried again at 

 (he present day, they would doubtless be attended with very similar results. ED. 



