130 AFFECTION IN BIRDS* 



that made a most grotesque figure ; nor was it without great 

 difficulty that it could be taken, when it proved to be a large 

 white-bellied field-mouse, with three or four young clinging to 

 her teats by their mouths and feet. It was amazing that the 

 desultory and rapid motions of this dam should not oblige her 

 litter to quit their hold, especially when it appeared that they 

 were so young as to be both naked and blind ! * 



To these instances of tender attachment, many more of which 

 might be daily discovered, by those that are studious of nature, 

 may be opposed that rage of affection, that monstrous perver- 

 sion of the <fc*Cj% which induces some females of the brute 

 creation to devour their young, because their owners have 

 handled them too freely, or removed them from place to place ! 

 Swine, and sometimes the more gentle race of dogs and cats, are 

 guilty of this horrid and preposterous murder.f When I hear 

 now and then of an abandoned mother that destroys her 

 offspring, I am not so much amazed ; since reason perverted, 

 and the bad passions let loose, are capable of any enormity ; 

 but why the parental feelings of brutes, that usually flow in 

 one most uniform tenor, should sometimes be so extravagantly 

 diverted, I leave to abler philosophers than myself to determine. 



LETTER LIII. 

 TO THE HON. DAINES HARRINGTON. 



SELBORNE, July 8, 1773. 



DEAR SIR, Some young men went down lately to a pond 

 on the verge of Wolmer Ferest, to hunt flappers, or young 

 wild ducks, many of which they caught, and, among the rest, 

 some very minute yet well-fledged wild fowls alive, which, 

 upon examination, I found to be teals. I did not know till 

 then that teals ever bred in the south of England, and was 



* Bats fly with their young adhering to their teats. ED. 



f There are a few species, and but a few, of the brute creation which 

 occasionally destroy their offspring immediately on their birth, an anomaly 

 in the law of nature commonly followed by another, that of devouring 

 them. But as the latter usually takes place among domestic animals, it 

 is obvious that hunger has no share in the transaction, and that it may 

 rather be ascribed to some temporary derangement (occasioned, perhaps, 

 by agonizing pain) of the instinctive solicitude, interwoven with the 

 constitution and existence of every living creature, to protect and preserve 

 its young. JED. 



