NATURAL HISTOEY OF SELBOKNE. 59 



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 procured 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 Eay. 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 

 picis affines. It ought no doubt to have gone among his aviculce caudd 

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

 division. Linnasus 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, imitating the 

 note of a sparrow, a swallow, a sky-lark ; and has a strange hurrying 

 manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the 

 description of your fen salicaria shot near Eevesby.* Mr. Eay has 

 given an excellent characteristic of it when he says, " Rostrum et pedes 

 in hdc aviculd multd majores sunt qudm pro corporis ratione." See 

 letter, May 29, 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 STONE CURLEW'S EGG, 



nauseous effluvia as ren- 

 dered it hardly supportable. Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Bay's 

 " Synop. Quadr." is an innocuous and sweet animal ; but, when pressed 



* This is the Salicaria phragmitis, the sedge warbler, sedge bird, or Reed fauvette 

 of British authors. It is by far the most common and generally distributed of our 

 native species of Salicaria, and is distinct from that referred to in preceding letters. 



