70 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, 



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. 

 Linnseus might, with great propriety, have put it into his 

 genus of Motacilla ; and 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 and sedges of moors. The country 

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

 incessantly night and day during the breeding-time, imi- 

 tating 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 et 

 pedes in hdc aviculd multo majores sunt quam pro corporis 

 ratione." See letter. May 29th, 1769. (Preceding letter, 

 xxiv.) 



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 



