more ready to fulfil my promise, because I see you are a gentleman of great candour, and one that will make allowances, especially where the writer professes to be an outdoor naturalist, one that takes his observations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others.

The following is a List of the Summer Birds of Passage which I have discovered in this neighbourhood, ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear.*

* It is very pleasing to see the accuracy of Mr. White's list of summer and winter birds of passage as he discovered them in his own neighbourhood. The following may comprehend all those which have hitherto been discovered in his county, and in the list are included the permanent residents and occasional visitors :

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 jynx and cuculus, which are pice, and the charadrius (œdicnemus) and rallus (ortygometra), which are grallæ.

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 :

RAII NOMINA.
Enanthe secunda.
Enanthe tertia.

Whin-chat,
Stone-chatter,

Golden-crowned wren,

Regulus cristatus.

This is the smallest British

bird haunts the tops of tall trees; stays the winter through.

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 :—

Nightingale,

Woodlark,

Less reed-sparrow,

Luscinia.

Alauda arborea.

I Passer arundina-
ceus minor.

"In shadiest covert hid."

MILTON.
Suspended in mid air.
Among reeds and willows.

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, Aug. 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 life of natural history, I should pass over this query very 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 ring-ousels did the same, as well as their congeners, the fieldfares; 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 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 nor 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 by Ray, who ranges it among his pici affines. It ought, no doubt, to have gone among his aviculæ caudâ unicolore, and among your slenderbilled 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 aviculâ multò majores sunt quàm pro corporis ratione. The beak and feet of this bird are too large for the proportions of the rest of the body.

I have got you the egg of an ædicnemus, 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 in self-defence. 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.

* See Letter xxiv. p. 82.

H