OF SELBORNE. 127 



made, no doubt, many discoveries, and laid up a good 

 fund of materials for a future edition of the British 

 Zoology; and will have no reason to repent that you 

 have bestowed so much pains on a part of Great Britain 

 that perhaps was never so well examined before. 



It has always been matter of wonder to me that 

 fieldfares, which are so congenerous to thrushes and 

 blackbirds, should never choose to breed in England : 

 but that they should not think even the highlands cold 

 and northerly, and sequestered enough, is ""a circum- 

 stance still more strange and wonderful. The ring- 

 ousel, you find, stays in Scotland the whole year round ; 

 so that we have reason to conclude that those migrators 

 that visit us for a short space every autumn do not 

 come from thence. 



And here, I think, will be the proper place to mention 

 that those birds were most punctual again in their 

 migration this autumn, appearing, as before, about the 

 30th of September: but their flocks were larger than 

 common, and their stay protracted somewhat beyond 

 the usual time. If they came to spend the whole 

 winter with us, as some of their congeners do, and 

 then left us, as they do, in spring, I should not be so 

 much struck with the occurrence, since it would be 

 similar to that of the other winter birds of passage ; 

 but when I see them for a fortnight at Michaelmas, 

 and again for about a week in the middle of April, I 

 am seized with wonder, and long to be informed whence 

 these travellers come, and whither they go, since they 

 seem to use our hills merely as an inn or baiting place. 



Your account of the greater brambling, or snow-fleck, 

 is very amusing; and strange it is, that such a short- 

 winged bird should delight in such perilous voyages 

 over the northern ocean ! Some country people in the 

 winter time have every now and then told me that 

 they have seen two or three white larks on our downs ; 

 but, on considering the matter, I begin to suspect that 

 these are some stragglers of the birds we are talking of, 



