NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 119 



of Salisbury";* wherein he says, "I had been often told that 

 these birds bred occasionally on our downs, and was promised 

 some eggs by a person who unhesitatingly affirmed so ; but when 

 they were sent, they turned out to be the eggs of the Stone 

 Curlew or Norfolk Plover, as I had all along imagined they 

 would be found to be." t 



But the Wiltshire bird, par excellence, around which the 

 greatest interest centres is, of course, the Great Bustard, now, 

 alas ! extinct in this country as a breeding species, but once 

 not uncommon upon the open downs of Wiltshire and Berkshire, 

 the wide heaths of Norfolk, and the wolds of Lincolnshire and 

 Yorkshire. Dr. Thomas Muffett, who lived at Bulbridge, in Wilt- 

 shire, in Elizabeth's time, and died in 1590, tells us in his quaintly 

 written work, ' Health's Improvement,' that " in the summer, 

 towards the ripening of corn, he has seen half a dozen of these 

 great birds lie in a wheat field (as a deer will do) with ease and 

 eating ; whereupon they would grow sometimes to such a bigness 

 that one of them would weigh almost fourteen pounds." Chafin, 

 also, in his 'Anecdotes and History of Cranbourn Chase,' des- 

 cribes very graphically how, in 1751, he encountered on the 

 Wiltshire downs, near Winterslow, a flock of twenty-five Great 

 Bustards, which he pursued for some distance on horseback in an 

 unsuccessful attempt to overtake and shoot one. Strange to say, 

 neither of these authors are referred to in the volume before us. 

 This is to be regretted ; for such positive evidence as theirs, on 

 the subject of a species now so rarely seen in Wiltshire, is too 

 important to be omitted in a book dealing exclusively with 

 the birds of that county. 



At page 4 of his " Introduction," Mr. Smith gives a com- 

 parative table of the number of species observed in different 

 counties (Cornwall, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Somersetshire, 

 Middlesex, Sussex), and remarks that out of 199 different kinds 

 of British land-birds mentioned in the latest edition of Yarrell, 

 133 have been met with in his county, while out of 176 water- 

 birds accredited to the British Islands, Wiltshire (with no sea- 

 coast) can claim to have harboured at one time or another no less 



* 'Wilts Archisol. & Nat. Hist. Mag.' 1883. 



f Mr. Morres by this time (1883) had forgotten his former anxiety to 

 include Numenius as a breeding species amongst the Birds of Wiltshire, 

 cf. Zool. 1877, p. 10G. 



