36 WHITE ROOKS AND BLACKBIRDS. 



i /Vf, tfitfvg . 



Quadrifidae nares, quadruplices ad respirationem canales. 



OP. Cyn. Lib. ii. 1. 181. 



Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say, that 

 goats breathe at their ears, whereas he asserts just the contrary : 

 AXx/jbaicvv yao OVK aXqdri Xs^i, (pa/Atvog avaffvuv rag aiyag 

 xara ra wra. " Alcmseon does not advance what is true, 

 when he avers that goats breathe through their ears." 

 History of Animals, Book i. chap. xi. 



LETTER XV. 



TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. 



SELBORNE, March 30, 1768. 



DEAR SIR, Some intelligent country people have a notion 

 that we have, in these parts, a species of the genus mustelmwn^ 

 besides the weasel, stoat, ferret, and polecat ; a little reddish 

 beast, not much bigger than a field mouse, but much longer, 

 which they call a cane. This piece of intelligence can be little 

 depended on ; but farther inquiry may be made.* 



A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milk-white 

 rooks in one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them before 

 they were able to fly, threw them down, and destroyed them, 

 to the regret of the owner, who would have been glad to have 

 preserved such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw the birds 

 myself nailed against the end of a barn, and was surprised to 

 find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws, were milk-white. 



A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down 

 above my house this winter : were not these the cmbcriza nivalw, 

 the snow-flake of the British Zoology ? No doubt they were.f 



* The cane has been satisfactorily proved to be the common weasel. 

 It is called in Suffolk the mouse-hunt. ED. 



f We can see no reason why the bird referred to may not have been a 

 white lark, as well as a snow-bunting. We have seen white birds of 

 many British species. There was a white lark shot in the neighbourhood 

 of Kingston Rectory, near Canterbury, in October, 1828. In the Natural 

 History Magazine there is a notice of a blackbird's nest found at St 

 Anstell, Cornwall, containing two birds, one of them perfectly white. 

 In the summer of 1831, a blackbird's nest was found at Newbottle, near 

 Edinburgh, containing four young ; two of which were of the ordinary 

 colour, and two perfectly white. The former turned out females, ani 

 the latter were both male birds. On the grounds of Drumsheugh, the 

 property of our friend Sir Patrick Walker, there was, some years ago, 

 a beautifully mottled blackbird, which became so tame that it fed along 



