This assemblage of curious and amusing birds belongs to ten several genera of the Linnæan system; and are all of the ordo of passeres, save the yunx and cuculus, which are pica, and the charadrius (oedicnemus) and rallus, (ortygometra,) which are gralla.

These birds, as they stand numerically, belong to the following Linnæan genera :—

Most soft-billed birds live on insects, and not on grain and seeds, and therefore at the end of summer they retire; but the following soft-billed birds, though insect eaters, stay with us the year round:

A List of the Winter Birds of Passage round this neighbourhood, ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear.

These birds, as they stand numerically, belong to the following Linnæan genera :—

Birds that sing in the night are but few :—

Loxia.
Ampelis.

I should now proceed to such birds as continue to sing after midsummer, but as they are rather numerous, they would exceed the bounds of this paper; besides, as this is now the season for remarking on that subject, I am willing to repeat my observations on some birds, concerning the continuation of whose song I seem at present to have some doubt.

LETTER XXVI.

TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ.

SELBORNE, August 30, 1769.

DEAR SIR,- 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 southward? Were not candour and openness the very life of natural history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commentator 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 ringousels did the same, as well as their congeners, the fieldfares; and especially as ringousels 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 salicaria 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 be convinced of the same) that it is no more or less than the 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 pici affines. It ought, no doubt, to have gone among his aviculæ cauda unicolore, and among your slender-billed small birds of the same division. Linnæus 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, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark; and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your fen salicaria shot near Revesby. Mr Ray has given an excellent characteristic of it when he says, "Rostrum et pedes in hâc avicula multò majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione."

I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, 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 defendendo. 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 supportable. Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Ray's Synop. Quadr. 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. †

* See Letter XXIV.

The skunk (Mephitis Americanis of Desmarest) is an animal nearly allied to a weasel, and a native of South America. Professor Kalm mentions that a skunk was once perceived by a servant in a cellar. She attacked and killed it, without thinking of the effluvia which it would occasion; and the place was instantly filled with a horrid stench,

A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the lanius minor cinerascens cum maculâ in scapulis albâ, Raï; which is a bird that, at the time of your publishing your two first volumes of British Zoology, I find you had not seen. have described it well from Edward's drawing. *

You

LETTER XXVII.

TO THE HON. DAINES BARRINGTON.

SELBORNE, November 2, 1769.

DEAR SIR,- When I did myself the honour to write to you, about the end of last June, on the subject of natural history, I sent you a list of the summer birds of passage which I have observed in this neighbourhood, and also a list of the winter birds of passage: I mentioned, besides, those soft-billed birds that stay with us the winter through in the south of England, and those that are remarkable for singing in the night.

According to my proposal, I shall now proceed to such birds (singing birds, strictly so called) as continue in full song till after midsummer, and shall range them somewhat in the order in which they first begin to open as the spring advances :

which so affected the thoughtless woman, that she was taken seriously ill, in which state she continued for some considerable time. - ED.

*This is probably the wood-shrike, (lanius rutilus of Latham.) It is amongst the rarest of our occasional visitants, but not so much so as some imagine, being often mistaken for the common butcher-bird. Mr Hog mentions two having been killed near Canterbury, and another at Swaffham, Norfolk, within these few years. He says it places its nest invariably on trees, preferring the oak. One lately killed is in the collection of the Rev. R. Hammond, Swaffham. - Ed.