86 NATURAL HISTORY 



your slender-billed small birds of the same division. Lin- 

 naeus might with great propriety have put it into his genus 

 of Motacilla ; and the 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. 1 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 excel- 

 lent characteristic of it when he says, " Rostrum et pedes in 

 Jtdc aviculd multb majores sunt qiCam pro corporis ratione." 

 See Letter, May 29, 1769. 



I have got you the egg of an (Edicnemus, 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 support- 

 able. Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Ray's " Synopsis 

 Quadrupedum" is an innocuous and sweet animal; but, 

 when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such a 

 most pestilent and fetid smell and excrement that nothing 

 can be more horrible. 



A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the Lanius 

 minor cinerascens cum macula in scapulis all>a, RAii; 2 which 

 is a bird that, at the time of your publishing your two first 

 volumes of " British Zoology/' I find you had not seen. 

 You have described it well from Edwards' s drawing. 



1 Salicaria phragmitis, see note 2, p. 82. ED. 



2 The woodcliat, Lanius rvtilus, Latham. This is one of the earliest 

 British specimens noticed. ED. 



