OF SELBORNE 59 



ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries : but I 

 have good reason to suspect since that they may come to us from 

 the westward ; because I hear, from very good authority, that 

 they breed on. Dartmore ; 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 it's eye and a tawny rump.i I 

 have surveyed it alive and dead, and have procured several speci- 

 mens ; and am perfectly persuaded myself (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 affines. It ought no doubt to have 

 gone among his aviculce caudd unicolore, and among your slender- 

 billed small birds of the same division. Linnceus might with great 

 propriety have put»,it into his genus of motacilla ; and the 

 motacilla salicaria of Tiis 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. It sings 

 incessantly night and day during the breeding-time, imitating the 

 note of a sparrow, a swallow, a sky-lark ; and has a strange 

 hurrying manner in it's song. My specimens correspond itiost 

 minutely to the description of yourybra salicaria shot near Revesby. 

 Mr. Ruy has given an excellent characteristic of it when he says, 

 " Rostrum Sf pedes in hdc aviculd mulib majores sunt quam pro corporis 

 ratione ". See letter May 2,Q, 1769- [Letter XXIV.] 



I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, 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 it's 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 supportable. Thus the squnck, or stonck, 



' [The sedge-warbler (Acrocefhalus fhragmiti^ Bechst. ). See preSeding letter. ] 



