82 LETTERS TO MERRETT. 



[Fol. 58.] Honord Sr I humbly thank you for your 

 care of my sonnes paper & the Royll Societie for their 

 acceptance of it. If hee bee in health I knowe hee is 

 mindfull of their comands receiued aboue 2 months ago 

 by a letter from Mr. Oldenburg.^^^ I haue not heard from 

 him of late the last I receiued was from Komorn* in 

 Lower Hungary and hee was then going to the mine 

 countryes. I think the Rowd may bee calld Rutilus 

 ventre magis compresso^^^ w'^'' is the first discoverable 

 difference to the eye. The weazelling [see Note 66] 

 is as you see in the draught a long fish figura 

 ad teretem vergente. somewhat of the shape butt 

 differing in the head from the mustela viuipara of 

 Schoneueld. butt not lozenged on the back though 

 the back bee much darker then the other parts. I send 

 you the figure of the head of a cristated wild duck, it is 

 black blackish \sic\ in the greater part of the body some 

 white on the brest & wings blewish legges & bill & seems 

 to bee of the Latirostrous tribe perhaps you haue it not. 

 it may bee called Anas niacrolophos [Fol. 59] as excelling 

 in that kind.''''^ there is also a draught of one sort of 

 mergus cristatus resembling that of Aldrovandus or John- 

 stonus where there is only the figure of the head only 



* A well-known town on the Danube, forty-seven miles west of Buda- 

 Pesth, probably the Comorra of E. Browne's letter to his father, cf. 

 Wilkin, i., p. 159. 



^^^ Henry Oldenburg (1615-1677) was born at Bremen. Came to 

 England about 1640, where he remained eight years. In 1653 he was 

 sent to England from Bremen on a diplomatic mission to Cromwell. He 

 returned to England a third time in 1660. He was an original Member of 

 the Royal Society, and became one of its first Secretaries. A half-length 

 portrait is in the possession of the Royal Society. 



^^^ The Rudd (Leuciscus erytkropkthahnus. Will. ) is known in -Norfolk as 

 the Roud. Browne seems to treat it as a variety of the Roach (Rutilus, 

 Willugh.), and Merrett in his second letter remarks with approval "you 

 have very well named the Rutilus." 



^^ Fuligula cristata (Linnaeus), the Tufted Duck. 



