OF SELBORNE, 
99 
')y worms and insects, or, what is a succedaneum for them, 
fresh raw meat, can meet with neither in long and tedious 
voyages. It is from this defect of food that our collections 
(curious as they are) are defective, and we are deprived of 
some of the most delicate and lovely genera.* 
LETTER XXXI. 
TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQUIRE. 
Selbokne, Sept. 14, 1770. 
OU saw, I find, the ring-ousels again among 
their native crags ; and are farther assured 
that they continue resident in those cold 
regions the whole year.^ From whence 
then do our ring-ousels migrate so regu- 
larly every September, and make their appearance again, 
as if in their return, every April ? They are more early 
this year than common, for some were seen at the usual hill 
on the fourth of this month . 
An observing Devonshire gentleman tells me that they 
frequent some parts of Dartmoor, and breed there ; but leave 
those haunts about the end of September or beginning of 
October, and return again about the end of March. 
^ Since the foregoing remarks were penned, not only have the means 
of transport become much more rapid than was the case in White's 
day, but greater attention having been paid to the importation of foreign 
birds and animals, and more consideration given to their food, enter- 
prising individuals have succeeded in bringing alive and well to this 
country many more delicate species than those referred to by our 
author, and from much greater distances. If he regretted the inability 
in 1770 to procure a soft-billed bird from the coast of Guinea, how would 
he have marvelled to see alive in the Zoological Society's Gardens at 
the present day the insectivorous Australian Pied Grallina, Grallina 
australis, the Black-tailed Flower-bird, Anthornis melanura, from New 
Zealand, and the Wood swallow, Artamus superciliosus, from New South 
Wales. — Ed. 
2 From our present knowledge of the habits of the ring-ousel, we 
may infer with little doubt that Pennant's informant must have con- 
founded the dipper or water-ousel with the ring-ousel. — Ed. 
