OF SKLBORNE. 177 



perhaps to those of any of our warblers, the nightingale 

 excepted. 



troublesome to each other in plucking out feathers from their compa- 

 nions, and swallowing the small ones. Those which are grown up before 

 they are caught have not the same mischievous propensity. 



I cannot close this note without protesting against the injudicious 

 manner in which the genus Sylvia has been subdivided in the supplement 

 to Shaw's Zoology. What can be said in favour of a system that confines 

 the name Sylvia to the redbreast, bluebreast, and two European redstarts, 

 which have no sylvan habits, and lumps the nightingale and all the 

 aquatic warblers with the fruit-eating birds, under the" name Curruca? 

 There is a broad line of distinction which no ornithologist has noticed, 

 separating the fruit-eating Sylviae (Curruca, BECHST.) from the aquatic 

 warblers and the nightingale. In all the true Curruca, which live 

 mainly on vegetable food, the inside of the mouth and throat is of a fine 

 red : in the others of a yellow orange. Show me a nest of Sylviadtz, just 

 hatched, and by that feature I shall instantly determine to which family 

 they belong. I have seen no engravings or descriptions of birds, in 

 which due attention has been paid to the aperture of the bill. In the 

 true Curruca, or fruit-eating birds, it descends with a curvature below 

 the eye : in the wrens (I do not mean the troglodyte or common wren) 

 and in the aquatic warblers or sedge birds, it is straight and anterior to 

 the eye, the bill being in the wrens, or Reguli, slender and weak ; in the 

 sedge birds, of which I should make a genus Schcenia, strong and dilated 

 at the base. The incomparable nightingale has a very peculiar bill, and 

 I suspect that its two species, the larger and lesser, form a genus by them- 

 selves, unless the little known Sylv. sericea belong to them. But I should 

 think it belonged to the true Currncce as well as Sylv. Nissoria, Orphea, 

 melanocephala, Sarda, conspicillata, and subalpina. If Sylv. Provincialis 

 does not belong to them, but forms a separate genus as in Shaw's supple- 

 ment, Sylv. passerina will probably be found to belong to it. It is quite 

 an error of Bewick to give the passerine warbler as an English bird; that 

 which he represents is not the passerine warbler, but a repetition of the 

 Sylv. hortensis, with which he appears to have been imperfectly ac- 

 quainted, and calls erroneously Motacilla Hippolais. It varies much in 

 colour according to the age of the bird. 



Three years ago I saw, beside a wide green lane in the parish of East 

 Woodhay, in Hampshire, a pair of Sylvia of the fruit-eating division, or 

 Currucce, being individuals of a species which has never been described. 

 Mr. Sweet mentions, in his British Warblers, that he saw several one 

 summer attacking the fruit in the garden of Mr. Bright, near Bristol, 

 exactly answering to the description of my birds, and he adds that he 

 never saw any of them but in that one season. Those which I saw were 

 formed much like a whitethroat, but as large as a nightingale, the upper 

 parts rufous, with a dark line over the eye, the under parts of a glossy 

 silver colour, which shone very conspicuously in the sun. My attention 

 was first attracted at a considerable distance by one of these birds sitting 

 on a low branch of the hedge with its breast towards me. It did not stir 



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