XXVI.] OF SELBORNE. 
LETTER XXVI. 
TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. 
It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of tlie ousel 
migration pleases you. You put a very shrewd question when 
you ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is south- 
ward ? Was not candour and openness the very life of natural 
history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commentator 
does over a crabbed passage in a classic ; but common ingenuous- 
ness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, 
that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. Eor 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 ; 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 neither more nor 
less than the Passer ariindinaceus minor of Eay. 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 Eay, who ranges it among his Pici affines. It ought 
no doubt to have gone among his small birds with the tail of 
one colou.r {Aviculce caudd unicolore), and among your slender- 
billed birds of the same division. Linnaeus might, with great pro- 
priety, have put it into his genus of mota cilia, and the Motacilla 
salicaria of his " Fauna Suecica " seems to come the nearest io 
