THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ~° 63 
LETTER XXV. 
SELBORNE, Aug. 30th, 1769. 
It 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 migration is south- 
ward. Was not candor and openness the very life of natural 
history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commenta- 
tor 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 partake of our milder winters, and return to the northward 
again when the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the 
ting-ousels did the same, as well as their congeners the field- 
fares ; 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 westward; because 
I hear from very good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor ; 
and that they forsake that wild district 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 sa/icaria and 
mine, with a white stroke over its eye and a tawny rump. 
I have surveyed it alive and dead, and have procured several 
specimens, and am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you 
will soon become convinced of the same) that it is no more 
nor less than 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 Pic? affines. 
It ought no doubt to have gone among his avicule caudé 
unicolore,, and among your slender-billed small birds of the 
1 Small birds with tail of one color. 
