68 SALICARIA REPTILES. 



mine, with a white stroke over its eye, and a tawny rump. 1 

 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 or 

 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 pici affines. 

 It ought, no doubt, to have gone among his aviculce caudd 

 unicolore, and among your slender-billed small birds of the same 

 division. Linnaeus might, with great propriety, have put it 

 into his genus of motacilla ; and the motacilla salicaria of 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 arid sedges of moors. The country 

 people in some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings inces- 

 santly, night and day, during the breeding time, imitating the 

 note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark ; and has a strange 

 hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond most 

 minutely to the description of your fen salicaria shot near 

 Revesby. Mr Ray has given an excellent characteristic of it 

 when he says, " Rostrum el pcdes in hdc aviculd multo majores 

 sunt qudm pro corporis rationed 



I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stone-curlew, 

 which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground. There 

 were two ; but the finder inadvertently crushed one with his 

 foot before he saw them. 



When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had not 

 forgot to mention the faculty that snakes have of stinking se 

 defendendo. I knew a gentleman who kept a tame snake, 

 which was in its person as sweet as any animal, while in good 

 humour and unalarmed ; but, as soon as a stranger, or a dog 

 or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and filled the room with such 

 nauseous effluvia, as rendered it hardly supportable. Thus the 

 squnck, or stonck, of Ray's Synop. Quadr. is an innocuous 

 and sweet animal ; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, 

 it can eject such a most pestilent and fetid smell and excre- 

 ment, that nothing can be more horrible. )* 



* See Letter XXIV. 



f The skunk (Mephitis Americanis of Desmarest) is an animal 

 nearly allied to a weasel, and a native of South America. Professor 

 Kalm mentions that a skunk was once perceived by a servant in a cellar. 

 She attacked and killed it, without thinking of the effluvia which it 

 would occasion j and the place was instantly filled with a horrid stench, 



