io NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



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 its advantage : it is notwith- 

 standing 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 red- 

 breast 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. 1 



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 Cherwell, 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 subsis- 

 tence might be : all that I could ever find was a soft mucus, 

 among which lay many pellucid small gravels. 



I am, &c. 



1 Here occurs in the original MS. Letter XLI to Pennant, beginning "It is 

 a matter of curious enquiry, &c.," which, it will be noticed, bears no date. It 

 would seem, therefore, that Gilbert White took these paragraphs from his letter 

 to Harrington and inserted them as a ' Pennant' Letter in his published work. 

 [R. B. S.] 



