ἀληθὴ λέγει, φάμενος ἀνάπνειν τὰς αἰγὰς κατὰ τὰ ὦτα.” "Alemæon does not advance what is true, when he avers that goats breathe through their ears."HISTORY OF ANIMALS, Book I. chap. xi.

SELBORNE, March 12, 1768.

LETTER XV.

TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ.

OME intelligent country people have a notion that we have, in these parts, a species of the genus mustelinum, besides

the weasel, stoat, ferret, and polecat; a little reddish beast, not much bigger than a field mouse, but much longer, which they call a cane. * This piece of intelligence can be little depended on; but farther inquiry may be made.

A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milkwhite rooks in one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them before they were able to fly, threw them down and destroyed them, to the regret of the owner, who would have been glad to have preserved such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw the birds myself nailed against the end of a barn, and was

There are only four of the British mustela, and the cane is a provincial name of one of them, the common weasel; the mouse-hunter being another. The animal in running, like other beasts of prey, looks thinner than it really is-a circumstance well known to the Indian tiger-hunter, and this probably is the origin of the mistake. The female being a fourth smaller may also have led to the notion of there being a fifth mustella.-ED.

surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws were milkwhite.

[Rooks are continually fighting and pulling each other's nests to pieces: these proceedings are inconsistent with living in such close community. And yet if a pair offer to build on a single tree, the nest is plundered and demolished at once. Some rooks roost on their nest trees. The twigs which the rooks drop in building supply the poor with brushwood to light their fires. Some unhappy pairs are not permitted to finish any nest till the rest have completed their building. As soon as they get a few sticks together, a party comes and demolishes the whole. As soon as rooks have finished their nests, and before they lay, the cocks begin to feed the hens, who receive their bounty with a fondling tremulous voice and fluttering wings, and all the little blandishments that are expressed by the young, while in a helpless state. This gallant deportment of the males is continued through the whole season of incubation. These birds do not copulate on trees, nor in their nests, but on the ground in the open fields.*]

A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down above my house this winter: were not these the emberiza nivalis, the snow-flake of the Brit. Zool.? No doubt they were.

A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it was

* After the first brood of rooks are sufficiently fledged, they all resort to some distant place in search of food, but return regularly every evening, in vast flights, to their nest trees, where, after flying round with much noise and clamour, till they are all assembled together, they take up their abode for the night.-MARKWICK.

F

come to its full colours. In about a year it began to look dingy; and, blackening every succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hempseed. Such influence has food on the colour of animals! The pied and mottled colours of domesticated animals are supposed to be owing to high, various, and unusual food.*

I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo-pint (arum) was frequently scratched out of the dry banks of hedges, and eaten in severe snowy weather. After observing, with some exactness, myself, and getting others to do the same, we found it was the thrush kind that searched it out. The root of the arum is remarkably warm and pungent. Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken us. The blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by that fierce weather in January. In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, a little bird that raised my curiosity: it was of that yellow-green colour that belongs to the salicaria kind, and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no parus; and was too long and too big for the goldencrowned wren, appearing most like the largest willowwren. It hung sometimes with its back downwards,

It is no very unusual circumstance to find white and pied varieties among birds of dark plumage. Mr. Yarrell mentions white and cream-coloured as well as pied Ravens; and white Blackbirds are not uncommon. In a domesticated state food will, no doubt, somewhat influence the colour. It is known that fish take some of their colour from the bottom of the river; and Mr. Pegge, in his "Anonymia," mentions "that butterflies partake of the colours of the flowers they feed on;" a curious fact, if true. But it is difficult to see how the food of wild birds can affect the plumage of individuals since all fare alike.-ED.

Probably the Dartford Warbler (Melizophilus Dartfordiensis), which breeds with us, and specimens of which have

but never continuing one moment in the same place. I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed my aim.

I wonder that the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, should be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird: it abounds in all the campaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the autumn. Already they begin clamouring in the evening. They cannot, I think, with any propriety, be called, as they are by Mr. Ray, dwellers about streams or ponds, circa aquas versantes; for with us, by day at least, they haunt only the most dry, open, upland fields and sheep walks, far removed from water: what they may do in the night I cannot say. Worms are their usual food, but they also eat toads and frogs.

I can show you some good specimens of my new mice. Linnæus perhaps would call the species mus

minimus.

been killed at Alton. They are active little creatures, erecting the crest and tail, flying in a short jerking manner, and seizing small insects on the wing. It also feeds whilst flying, suspending itself with back and head down, as described in the text.-ED.