NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 69 



LETTER XXV. 



Selborne, Aug. ZOth, 1769. 



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 ? Was 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 par- 

 take of our milder winters, and return to the northward 

 again when the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that 

 the ring-ousels did the same, as well as their congeners the 

 fieldfares ; and especially as ring-ousels 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 very good authority, that they breed 

 on Dartmoor, and that they forsake that wild district 

 about the time that our visitors 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 pro- 

 cured several specimens, and am perfectly persuaded myself 

 (and trust you will soon become convinced of the same) 

 that it is no more nor 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 



