546 
NATURAL HI8T0BT 
When Mr. Townsend avers that the Nightingales at Valez * 
sing the winter through, I should conclude that he took up 
that notion on mere report, because I had a brother who 
lived eighteen years at Gibraltar, and who has written an 
accurate ]S"atural History of that rock, and its environs. 
'Now, he says that Nightingales leave Andalusia as regularly 
towards autumn as other summer birds of passage. A pair 
always breeds in the Governor's garden at the Convent. 
This history has never been published, and probably now 
never will, because the poor author has been dead some 
years. There is in his journals such ocular demonstration 
of swallow emigration to and from Barbary at Spring and 
Fall, as I know, would delight you much. There is an Hi- 
rundo Mherna that comes to Gibraltar in October and de- 
parts in March, and abounds in and about the Garrison the 
winter through.^ 
LETTER VI. 
TO ROBERT MARSHAM, ESQUIRE. 
Selborne, August 7, 1792. 
HILE all the young people of this neighbour- 
hood are gone madding this morning to the 
great last day's review at Bagshot, I am 
sitting soberly down to write to my friend 
in ISTorfolk ; almost, forgetting, now I am 
old, the impulse that young men feel to run after new 
1 Townsend (" Travels in Spain ") wrote " Velez," i. e. Velez Malaga, 
an older city than the present Malaga, on the old main road to Granada. 
2 See Letter XXXTI. to Pennant (p. 102), where White identifies his 
brother's bu-d, and correctly so, with the Hirundo rupestris of Scopoli. 
It is again mentioned by him in the seventh letter of the present series. 
