NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 73 



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- 

 veyed it alive and dead, and have procured several specimens, and 

 am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will soon become 

 convinced of the same) that it is no more nor less than the passer 

 arundinaceus minor of Ray. This bird, by some means or other, 

 seems to be entirely omitted in the British Zoology; and one reason 

 probably was because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who ranges 

 it among his picis affines. It ought no doubt to have gone among 

 his aviculcs cauda unicolore, and among your slender-billed small 

 birds of the same division. Linnaeus might with great propriety 

 have put it into his genus of motadlla ; and motacilla salicaria of 

 his fauna suecica seems to come the nearest to it. It is no uncom- 

 mon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there is 

 covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in 

 some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and 

 day during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a 



STONE-CURLEW'S EGG. 



swallow, a sky-lark ; and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. 

 My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your 

 fen salicaria shot near Revesby.* Mr. Ray has given an excellent 



* This is the Salicaria phragmitis, the sedge-warbler, sedge-bird, or Reedfauvette of 

 British authors. It is by far the most common and generally distributed of our native 

 species of Salicaria, and is distinct from that referred to in preceding letters. 



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