Letters on Natural History. 5041 



whitish gray below ; and it has no internal auricle or secondary ear 

 within the outer one, which, with the bi-lanceolate nasal appendage, 

 at once distinguishes it from every other British species. There are 

 said to be ten or twelve species of British bats, but I do not know 

 much about them ; in fact, for the last two years I have devoted my- 

 self so exclusively to Entomology that I have paid scarcely any atten- 

 tion to the other branches of the Science, but having now got a 

 tolerable footing among the insects I mean to divide my attention 

 between them and my old friends the birds. Next summer I have 

 some idea of studying fishes, which are much neglected in England, 

 but I doubt whether I shall make much of them. 



" I believe I have now discussed, to the best of my ability, all the 

 topics started in your last letter, and will now proceed with whatever 

 scraps of information I have collected since my last. 



" The little bustard {Otis tetrax) was shot on the 23rd of Decem- 

 ber last by a farmer, at Brockley Wood, somewhere in the neighbour- 

 hood of Oxford : it is now one of the rarest English birds, and I 

 cannot conceive how it continues to subsist in the island, the instances 

 of its capture being so ' few and far between ; ' while it is seemingly 

 too large a bird to escape detection, and much too feeble of flight to 

 be capable of crossing the Channel from France. 



" An itinerant bird-stuffer, named Burl, showed me lately a specimen 

 of the scissor-tailed goatsucker of S. America {Caprimulgus psalurus 

 of Temminck), which he assured me he himself shot at Tewkesbury, 

 in Gloucestershire, June 19th, 1825: I should not of course give im- 

 plicit credit to a bird-stuffer's account of a bird which he had on sale ; 

 but from the soft and fresh appearance of the skin, which had not the 

 hardened and compressed air of one which had been packed and sent 

 across sea, I should almost feel inclined to credit his statement, in 

 which case the bird would be a singular addition to our British Fauna. 

 There is an uncoloured plate of it in Griffith's translation of Cuvier, 

 which 1 think you have in your public reading-room. The same man 

 told me that in December, 1832, he saw a specimen of the longlegged 

 plover at Frensham pond (the same place whence White's specimen 

 came from), but could not get at it: at the same time there were some 

 specimens seen there of the Egyptian spurwinged plover, one of 

 which was shot. The same man showed me a specimen of the black- 

 billed whistling duck of the West Indies, which he told me was sent 

 to him in the flesh twenty-two or twenty-three years ago, and which 

 he understood to have been shot on one of the Cumberland lakes. 



XIV. Q 



