OF S^LBORNE. 
85 
LETTER XXY. 
TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQUIRE. 
Selborne, Aug. 30, 17C9. 
T gives me satisfaction to find that my account 
of the ousel migration pleases you. You 
put a very shrewd question when you ask 
me how I know that their autumnal migra- 
tion is southward ? Were 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 ingenuousness obliges 
me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that 
I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other 
autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to par- 
take 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 west- 
ward ; because I hear, from very good authority, that they 
breed on Dartmoor ; and that they forsake that wild dis- 
trict 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 pro- 
cured several specimens ; and am perfectly persuaded my- 
self (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 the " British Zoology ; and one reason 
probably was because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who 
ranges it among his Picis offines. It ought no doubt to 
have gone among his Aviculce cauda unicolorej and among 
