306 BIRDS OF DUMFRIESSHIRE 
In their notes on this poem they write : " There has been no 
little discussion as to the date, the heroine, and the scene . . . 
We are able to put a term to this * pleasing state of 
uncertainty.' Flow Gently, Sweet Afton was sent to Mrs. 
Dunlop 5th February 1789 (Lochryan MSS.), and in the 
enclosing letter Burns expHcitly declares that it was written 
for Johnson's Musical Museum, as a ' comphment ' to the 
' smaU river Afton that flows into Nith, near New Cumnock, 
which has some charming wild romantic scenery on its 
banks.' "* Robert Burns has thus sung, with poetic hcence, 
of a bird not known in Scotland in his day, and I regret to 
say that so good a naturahst as our poet Thomas Aird has 
followed his precedent. Even if I thought the identification 
of the species satisfactory, I could not claim this record of 
the Stock-Dove in 1789, for Afton Water rises on the west 
of the Black Lorg in Ayrshire, some five hundred yards 
beyond our county boundary. 
Sir WiUiam Jardine, writing in 1842, says of the Stock- 
Dove : " so far as we can ascertain [it] has not yet been 
met with in Scotland or Ireland ; it is, in fact, confined to a 
few of the southern counties in England."t In a letter to 
Mr. R. Service in 1887, H. A. Macpherson remarks on the 
absence of this species from the collection of Sir WiUiam 
Jardine's birds sold on June 17th, 1886, and adds : " But 
most of his British specimens are mounted at Edmburgh. 
There is, however, no record of any Stock-Dove, local or 
otherwise, having passed from Sir WiUiam Jardine to the 
Edinburgh Museum. The first local record I have come 
across is of " one shot on Duncan [i.e., Donkins] hme-kiln, near 
Ecclefechan, in November, 1858 "J ; as reported by Thomas 
Armstrong, a Post Office clerk at CarHsle, and a keen collector 
of birds. Mr. J. A. Harvie-Brown, in his paper on " The 
Increase and Dispersal of the Stock-Dove in Scotland,"§ 
* Poetry of Burns, 1901, Vol. III., pp. 395, 396. 
t Nat. Lib., 1842, Vol. XII., p. 64. 
X Zoologist, 1859, p. 6378. 
§ Proc. Roy. Phys. Soc. Edin., 1883, Vol. VII., pp. 241-254. 
