36 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



teat to each ? Perhaps she opens different places for that purpose, 

 adjusting them again when the business is over ; but she could not 

 possibly be contained herself in the bill with her young, which 

 moreover would be daily increasing in bulk. This wonderful pro- 

 creant cradle, an elegant instance of the efforts of instinct, was 

 found in a wheat-field suspended in the head of a thistle.* 



HARVEST MICE. 



A gentleman, curious in birds, wrote me word that his servant 

 had shot one last January, in that severe weather, which he believed 

 would puzzle me. I called to see it this summer, not knowing what 

 to expect, but the moment I took it in hand, I pronounced it the 

 male garrulus bohemicus or German silk-tail, from the five peculiar 

 crimson tags or points which it carries at the ends of five of the 

 short remiges. It cannot, I suppose, with any propriety, be called 

 an English bird ; and yet I see, by Ray's " Philosophical Letters," 

 that great flocks of them, feeding on haws, appeared in this king- 

 dom in the winter of 1*685. f 



* This is the harvest-mouse, inns messorins, of Shaw ; and it is to Mr. White that we 

 are indebted for the first notice and description of it as a British species, which he 

 communicated to Mr. Pennant, who introduced it in the British zoology upon that 

 authority. It is not unfrequent in some of the southern English counties, but becomes 

 more rare northward. In Scotland it occasionally occurs, and on the authority of the 

 late Professor Macgillivray, has been obtained in Aberdeenshire. It is the smallest of 

 our British mammalia, and its habits are very interesting. 



The nests are very curious structures, and instead of being formed upon the ground, as 

 those of most of the species, the ball or nest is suspended from the stems of grain or other 

 "high vegetation. One is described in the Memoir of Dr. Gloger. " It was in skilfulness 

 of construction fully equal to that of most birds, was suspended from the summit of three 

 straws of the common reed (Arnndo phragmites},ar\& was entirely composed of the 

 pannicles and leaves of the plants slit longitudinally, and intricately platted and matted 

 together. Its internal cavity was small and round, and accessible only by a narrow 

 lateral opening." 



t The letter alluded to was from Mr. Johnson to Mr. Ray, in 1686. " On the back-side 



