42 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



LETTER XV. 



SELBORNE, March SQlh, 1768. 



SOME intelligent country people have a notion that we have 

 in these parts a species of the genus mustelinum, besides 

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

 beast, riot 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 

 Emberiza nivalis, the snow-flake of the Brit. Zool. ? No 

 doubt they were. 



A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which 

 had been caught in the fields after it was come to its full 

 colours. In about a year it began to look dingy ; and, 

 blackening every succeeding year, it became coal-black at 

 the end of four. Its chief food was hempseed. Such 

 influence has food on the colour of animals ! The pied and 

 mottled colours of domesticated animals are supposed to be 

 owing to high, various, and unusual food. 



I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo- 

 pint (arum) was frequently scratched out of the dry banks 



