Number of Species in Wiltshire. 5 



very large field to the inquiring ornithologist. In. great measure, 

 too, it is an open and an untrodden field, singularly wanting in 

 writers on this particular branch of Natural History. Good old 

 Aubrey professed, indeed, to give some account of the Natural 

 History of Wilts ;* but as regards its Ornithology, and I should 

 not wrong him if I included all the other branches, he was 

 ludicrously ill-informed, even for that unscientific age. In 

 very little more than one page of quarto size he disposes of 

 the whole of the birds of Wilts, enumerating just fifteen genera, 

 and in the following unmethodical sequence : ' Larkes, Buntings, 

 Linnets, Woodpeckers, Wheateares, Bustards, Gray Crowes, 

 Rookes, Feasants, Bitterns, Herons, Sparrow-hawkes, Hobbies, 

 Ganders, Sea-mewes ;' and within these narrow limits he con- 

 trives to embody quite as many errors as facts ; the latter, too, 

 being of the very tritest and best known. Perhaps that was 

 excusable in one who wrote on Natural History two hundred 

 years ago, when ignorance of the very rudiments of that science, 

 and even of the existence of some of the commonest species all 

 around, was universal. But the only other writer on the birds of 

 Wilts has no such excuse ; for Dr. William George Maton, of 

 Redlynch House, Salisbury, of high repute as an eminent 

 physician, a Fellow of many learned societies, and undoubtedly 

 an accomplished botanist, conchologist, geologist, and antiquary, 

 and who flourished at the beginning of this century, wrote what 

 he was pleased to call ' The Natural History .of a Part of the 

 County of Wilts ;'t and certainly, as regards the chapter on 

 ' Aves,' anything more meagre and more absolutely misleading, 

 on account of its wholesale omissions, than the wretched account 

 he gives of Wiltshire birds, it is impossible to conceive. The 

 whole number of species mentioned by him amounts to just 

 twenty-three ; and these are not selected for their rarity, for the 

 Heron, the Sand-martin, the Lapwing, the common Water-hen, 



The ' Natural History of Wiltshire,' by John Aubrey, F.R.S., A.D. 1685. 



t The ' Natural History of a Part of the County of Wilts, comprehended 

 within the distance of ten miles round the City of Salisbury,' by George 

 Maton, M.D., F.U.S., Y.P.L.S., F.S.A. Published (after hh death) A.D. 

 1843. 



