260 RAMBLES OF A NATURALIST. 
leave it in the hands of an intelligent jury ;” merely ob- 
serving that there surely never was a bird about which so 
much misapprehension has existed,—a misapprehension 
which I read extends even to the continent. My next 
reference will be to the “Zoologist,” (p. 2684) where 
Mr. T. J. Tuck has recorded one at Mildenhall in Suffolk. 
He saw it soon after being mounted. It was shot, as he has 
informed me, about February, 1869, and the possessor of it 
is Mr. Gregory Sparke of Bury. Then I hear that it has 
a place in Rowe’s “Perambulation of the Forest of. Dart- 
moor,” but I have not the book to refer to. There is no 
mention of it in his catalogue published in 1863, so I 
pass it by as suspicious and go on to those figured in 
Mr. Selby’s splendid folios, which are equally doubtful. I 
could not see them in the Twizell collection which I went 
over shortly after his death. 
With regard to Scotland, there is an air of probability 
about the pair* recorded in Gray’s “Birds of the West of 
Scotland,” (p. 299) to have been obtained in August, 1870, 
at or near Aberdeen, which no one can deny, and I must 
say that all the careful enquiries which I have made from 
Mr. Angus and Mr. Mitchell, have not shaken the authen- 
ticity of these specimens, but have entirely tended to con- 
firm them. I am assured on all hands of their genuineness, 
that they were left while in the flesh at the Museum, that 
the stomachs were sent to Mr. Gray for dissection, and that 
they really were killed where stated. The species is also 
in the statistical catalogue of Wick in Caithness, but 
Mr. W. Reid, who has examined the bird for me, writes that 
it is not a Spotted Sandpiper, and from his description I have 
no doubt that he is right in considering it to be a Spotted 
Redshank, a very different bird with which it has more 
* A photograph of them was obligingly sent to me, and I have since 
had an opportunity of examining one of them at Mr. Gray’s house. 
