84 RINGOUSELS SALICARIA. 



XXV. 



IT gives me satisfaction to find that my account 

 of the ousel migration pleases you. You put a 

 very shrewd question when you ask me how I 

 know that their autumnal migration is southward ? 

 Were 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 ingenuousness 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 

 northward to us, to partake of our milder winters, 

 and return to the northward again when the rigor- 

 ous cold abates, so I concluded that the ringousels 

 did the same, as well as their congeners the field- 

 fares ; and especially as ringousels are known to 

 haunt cold mountainous countries : but I have good 

 reason to suspect since, that they may come to us 

 from the westward ; because I hear from good au- 

 thority, that they breed on Dartmoor : and that 

 they forsake that wild district about the time that 

 our visiters 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 arundinaceits minor 

 of Ray 1 . 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 



1 See p. 85. 



