The Zoologist— May, 18G7. 749 



The occurrence of a second specimen of Strix asio is too interesting 

 to be omitted here: the only previous notice of the species will be 

 found in the ' Naturalist/ for August, 1855 : it is cited in the preface 

 to Mr. Yarrell's third edition, at p. vi., and again in my edition of 

 Montagu, at p. 221 : — 



Scops asio.— "Mr. Gurney informs me that some years back he 

 purchased from the late Mr. Thurtell, then a nurseryman at Eaton 

 (when selling off his collection of Norfolk birds), an adult specimen of 

 this rare owl, said to have been killed near Yarmouth, but till then 

 supposed to be only an European scops owl."— p. 44. 



The barn owl, that true friend of the farmer and gardener, comes in 

 for a good word at the hands of our observant author:— 



Barn Owl.—" What a pleasure it is in an autumnal evening, when 

 returning at sunset after a long day's sport, to watch this owl on noise- 

 less wiugs flitting about the homestead. Now skimming along the 

 fences in search of prey, now rapidly turning the corner of the stack- 

 yard, it suddenly seizes upon some luckless victim, and is off in an 

 instant to its roost in the tower, or disappears for a time through the 

 little opening in the gable end of the barn. Its wild screech uUered 

 in the ' stilly night' is certainly somewhat startling to the nerves, and, 

 heard amidst the ruins of some crumbling cloisters, may well scare the 

 listener, unaccustomed to the sound; yet scarcely would one wish the 

 rustic mind altogether disabused of its old superstitions, if the associa- 

 tion of this owl with ' uncanny things ' might aid in preserving it from 

 unreasoning persecution. I would rather that every thoughtless clod, 

 who compassed the death of either old or young, might share the 

 horrors of that luckless wight who, having killed the church owl as it 

 flitted past him, ran shrieking home, and, with bis hair on end, con- 

 fessed his awful crime, < I've been and shot a cherubim.' "—p. 52. 



The theory I have propounded elsewhere, of the existence of pairs 

 of species scarcely distinguishable from each other, receives some 

 little illustration from Mr. Stevenson's very interesting notes on the 

 common dipper and bluethroated warbler, species which have long 

 been subjects of discussion among technical ornithologists: these 

 notes will I think be read with pleasure and profit, but I do not pre- 

 sume to offer any opinion on points that have proved so difficult of 

 solution. 



