OF SELBORNE 75 



as their congeners the fieldfares ; and especially as ring- 

 ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries : 

 but I have good reason to suspect since that they may 

 come to us from westward ; because I hear, from very 

 good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor ; and that 

 they forsake that wild district 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 its eye, and a tawny 

 rump. I have surveyed it alive and dead, and have 

 procured several specimens ; 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 th!fe 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 auiculie cauda unicolore, 

 and among your slender-billed small birds of the same 

 division. Linnaeus might with great propriety have put 

 it into his genus of motadlla ; and the moiacilla 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. 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 its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to 

 the description of your fen salicaria, shot near Revesby. 

 Mr. Ray has given an excellent characteristic of it when 

 he says, " Rostrum & pedes in hhc aviculb. multo majores 

 sunt quUm pro corporis ratione." See letter May 29, 

 1769. 



I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stone 



