shrewd question when you ask me how I know that 

 their autumnal migration is southward? Was not 

 candour and openness the very life of natural his- 

 tory, I should pass over this query just as a sly com- 

 mentator does over a crabbed passage in a classic ; 

 but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, 

 not without some degree of shame, that I only rea- 

 soned in that case from analogy. For as all other 

 autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to 

 partake of our milder winters, and return to the 

 northward again when the rigorous cold abates, so I 

 concluded that the ring-ousels did the same, as well 

 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 the westward ; be- 

 cause 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 eve 

 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 neither more 

 nor less than the Passer arzcndmaccus minor of Ray. 

 This bird, by some means or other, seems to be en- 

 tirely omitted in the British Zoology ; " and one 



1 06 



