64 The Natural History 



autumnal migration is southward ? ^Vas not candour 

 and openness the very life of natural history, I should 

 pass over this query just as a sly commentator does over 

 a crabbed passage in a classic ; but common ingenuous- 

 ness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of 

 shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. 

 For as all other autumnal birds migrate from the north- 

 ward to us, to partake of our milder winters, and return 

 to the northward again when the rigorous cold abates, 

 so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the same, as well 

 as their congeners the fieldfares ; and especially as ring- 

 ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries : 

 but I have good reason to suspect since that they may 

 come to us from 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 surveyed it alive and dead, and have 

 procured several specimens ; and am perfectly persuaded 

 myself (and trust you will soon be 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 affi)ies. It ought no 

 doubt to have gone among his aviculce cauda u7iicolorey 

 and among your slender-billed small birds of the same 

 division. Linnaeus might with great propriety have put 

 it into his genius of motacilla ; and the motacilla salicaria 

 o( his fauna suecica seems to come the nearest to it. It 

 is no uncommon 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 

 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. 



