OF SELBORNE. 85 



LETTER XXV. 



TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQUIRE. 



SELBORNE, Aug. 30, 1769. 



T 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 migra- 

 tion is southward ? Were 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 west- 

 ward ; because I hear, from very good authority, that they 

 breed on Dartmoor; and that they forsake that wild dis- 

 trict 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 my- 

 self, (and trust you will soon be 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 reason 

 probably was because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who 

 ranges it among his Picis affincs. It ought no doubt to 

 have gone among his Aviculce caudd unicolore, and among 



