OF SELBORNE 



It was not in my power to procure you a black-cap, or a less 

 reed-sparrow, or sedge-bird, alive. As the first is undoubtedly, and 

 the last, as far as I can yet see, a summer bird of passage, they 

 would require more nice and curious management in a cage than 

 I should be able to give them : they are both distinguished 

 songsters. The note of the former has such a wild sweetness 

 that it always brings to my mind those lines in a song in " As 

 You Like It ". 



' ' And tune his merry note 



" Unto the wild bird's throat." SHAKESPEARE. 



The latter has a surprising variety of notes resembling the 

 song of several other birds ; but then it has also an hurrying 

 manner, not at all to it's advantage : it is notwithstanding a 

 delicate polyglot. 



It is new to me that titlarks in cages sing in the night ; 

 perhaps only caged birds do so. I once knew a tame redbreast 

 in a cage that always sang as long as candles were in the room ; 

 but in their wild state no one supposes they sing in the night. 



I should be almost ready to doubt the fact, that there are to 

 be seen much fewer birds in July than in any former month, 

 notwithstanding so many young are hatched daily. Sure I am 

 that it is far otherwise with respect to the swallow tribe, which 

 increases prodigiously as the summer advances : and I saw, at 

 the time mentioned, many hundreds of young wagtails on the 

 banks of the Cherrvell, which almost covered the meadows. If 

 the matter appears as you say in the other species, may it not be 

 owing to the dams being engaged in incubation, while the young 

 are concealed by the leaves ? 



Many times have I had the curiosity to open the stomachs of 

 woodcocks and snipes ; but nothing ever occurred that helped to 

 explain to me what their subsistence might be : all that I could 

 ever find was a soft mucus, among which lay many pellucid small 

 gravels. 1 



I am, &c. 



1 [Mr. Harting in his note on this passage refers to some valuable observations 

 on the contents of the stomachs of woodcocks in Thompson's Birds of Ireland, 

 vol. ii. , p. 239, and adds, by way of explaining the soft mucus to which White 

 refers: "The vegetable matter, of which there is often a considerable quantity, 

 probably remains intact after the gastric juice has acted on the worms and other 

 animal food, and thus appears disproportionate to the other contents ". On the 

 other hand, Sedgwick (Textbook oj c Zoology, p. 237) says: "It maybe of interest 

 to gourmets to know that the trail of a woodcock largely consists of distomic 

 trematodes" (parasitic flat-worms).] 



