86 
NATURAL BISTORT 
your slender-billed small birds of tbe same division. Lin- 
naeus might with great propriety have put it into his genus 
of Motacilla ; and the Motacilla salicaria of his Fauna 
Suecica seems to come the nearest to it. It is no uncommon 
bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there 
is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country 
people in some places call it the sedge bird.^ It sings 
incessantly night and day during the breeding time, imi- 
tating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark ; and has 
a strange hurrjring manner in its song. My specimens 
correspond most minutely to the description of your fen 
salicaria shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excel- 
lent characteristic of it when he says, " Rostrum et j)edes in 
liac aviculd multb majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione.'^ 
See Letter, May 29, 1769. 
1 have got you the egg of an CEdicnemui'., or stone- 
curlew, which was picked up in a fallow on the naked 
ground : there were two ; but the finder inadvertently 
crushed one with his foot before he saw them. 
When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had 
not forgot to mention the faculty that snakes have of stinking 
se defendenclo. I knew a gentleman who kept a tame snake, 
which was in its person as sweet as any animal while in 
good humour and unalarmed ; but as soon as a stranger, or 
a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and filled the room 
with such nauseous effluvia as rendered it hardly support- 
able. Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Ray's Synopsis 
Quadrupedum^' is an innocuous and sweet animal ; but, 
when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such a 
most pestilent and fetid smell and excrement that nothing 
can be more horrible. 
A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the Lanius 
minor cinerascens cum macula in scapulis alhd, Raii;^ which 
is a bird that, at the time of your publishing your two first 
volumes of British Zoology I find you had not seen. 
You have described it well from Edwards's drawing. 
^ Salicaria phragmitis, see note 2, p. 82. — Ed. 
2 The woodchat, Lanius 7'utilus, Latham. This is one of the earliest 
British specimens noticed. — Ed. 
