WRYNECK.

THESE birds appear on the grassplots and walks; they walk a little as well as hop, and thrust their bills into the turf, in quest, I conclude, of ants, which are their food. While they hold their bills in the grass, they draw out their prey with their tongues, which are so long as to be coiled round their heads.

GROSBEAK.

MR. B. shot a cock grosbeak, which he had observed to haunt his garden for more than a fortnight. I began to accuse this bird of making sad havock among the buds of the cherries, gooseberries, and wall-fruit of all the neighbouring orchards. Upon opening its crop or craw, no buds were to be seen; but a mass of kernels of the stones of fruits. Mr. B. observed that this bird frequented the spot where plum trees grow; and that he had seen it with somewhat hard in its mouth, which it broke with difficulty; these were the stones of damsons. The Latin ornithologists call this bird Coccothraustes, i. e. berry-breaker, because with its large horny beak it cracks and breaks the shells of stone fruits for the sake of the seed or kernel. Birds of this sort are rarely seen in England, and only in winter20.

close to the plough to devour the worms, &c. that are turned up by that instrument. The redbreast attends the gardener when digging his borders; and will, with great familiarity and tameness, pick out the worms almost close to his spade, as I have frequently seen. Starlings and magpies very often sit on the backs of sheep and deer to pick out their ticks. —MARKWICK.

20 I have never seen this rare bird but during the severest cold of the hardest winters; at which season of the year I have had in my possession two or three that were killed in this neighbourhood in different

MARKWICK.

years.

OBSERVATIONS ON QUADRUPEDS.

459

SHEEP.

THE sheep on the downs this winter (1769) are very ragged, and their coats much torn; the shepherds say they tear their fleeces with their own mouths and horns, and that they are always in that way in mild wet winters, being teased and tickled with a kind of lice.

After ewes and lambs are shorn, there is great confusion and bleating, neither the dams nor the young being able to distinguish one another as before. This embarrassment seems not so much to arise from the loss of the fleece, which may occasion an alteration in their appearance, as from the defect of that notus odor, discriminating each individual personally; which also is confounded by the strong scent of the pitch and tar wherewith they are newly marked; for the brute creation recognise each other more from the smell than the sight; and in matters of identity and diversity appeal much more to their noses than to their eyes. After sheep have been washed there is the same confusion, from the reason given above.

RABBITS1.

RABBITS make incomparably the finest turf; for they not only bite closer than larger quadrupeds, but they

1 Having found in a stubble field a rabbit's nest, with young about four days old, which could not see, I had them brought home and given to be suckled to a tame doe which was kept by one of my children, and had young ones which were just old enough to be taken from her. She readily undertook the care of her new charge and reared them. When they came to see, it was observable that they were much more startlish and shy than the young rabbits of tame descent, and as they grew bigger they continued

allow no bents to rise: hence warrens produce much the most delicate turf for gardens. Sheep never touch the stalks of grasses.

CAT AND SQUIRRELS.

A BOY has taken three little young squirrels in their nest, or drey as it is called in these parts. These small creatures he put under the care of a cat who had lately lost her kittens, and finds that she nurses and suckles them with the same assiduity and affection as if they were her own offspring. This circumstance corroborates my suspicion, that the mention of exposed and deserted children being nurtured by female beasts of prey who had lost their young, may not be so improbable

so, and did not begin near so soon to eat what was offered to them. It is not customary with children to disturb the young rabbits till they are a few days old, so that these wild rabbits had exactly the same education as the tame ones, and yet the result was different. It is evident then that there was a natural difference of character between them from their birth, and a consideration of this point may be important in understanding even the differences between the several races of mankind. It is probable that the state of constant apprehension in which the wild rabbit lives, occasions an irritability of nerve which does not exist in the domestic race, and that such irritability occasions an actual difference in the quality of its fibres which is descendible in its generations. In the same manner it appears to me likely that savages do not acquire acuteness of hearing and some other peculiarities merely from the greater exercise of certain faculties from infancy, but because the extraordinary exercise of those faculties during several generations has rendered the organs which appertain to them different in their texture and tone from those of other races of men in whom those faculties have been quiescent, and more rarely or less intensely called into use.

These rabbits from wild parents, being now above half grown, continue to start away and crouch upon any quick movement of the boy that feeds them, while those of the domestic stock crowd round him; their timidity and want of confidence being unquestionably an inherited and not an acquired peculiarity.-W. H.

2 The squirrel's nest is not only called a drey in Hampshire, but, also, in other counties; in Suffolk it is called a bay. The word drey, though now provincial, I have met with in some of our old writers.-Mitford. The drey is not only the breeding-place, but the storehouse for the animal's provisions.-G. D.

In the north of Hampshire a great portion of the squirrels have white tails. None of this variety, as far as I can learn, reach the London market.

an incident as many have supposed; and therefore may be a justification of those authors who have gravely mentioned, what some have deemed to be a wild and improbable story.

So many people went to see the little squirrels suckled by a cat, that the foster mother became jealous of her charge, and in pain for their safety; and therefore hid them over the ceiling, where one died. This circumstance shows her affection for these foundlings, and that she supposes the squirrels to be her own young. Thus hens, when they have hatched ducklings, are equally attached to them as if they were their own chickens.

HORSE.

AN old hunting mare, which ran on the common, being taken very ill, ran down into the village, as it were to implore the help of men, and died the night following in the street.

HOUNDS.

THE king's stag hounds came down to Alton, attended by a huntsman and six yeomen prickers, with horns, to try for the stag that has haunted Harteley Wood and its environs for so long a time. Many hundreds of people, horse and foot, attended the dogs to see the deer unharboured; but though the huntsman drew

I was much surprised at hearing from a man who kept a bird and cage shop in London, that not less than twenty thousand squirrels are annually sold there for the menus plaisirs of cockneys, part of which come from France, but the greater number are brought in by labourers to Newgate and Leadenhall markets, where any morning during the season four or five hundred might be bought. He said that he himself sold annually about seven hundred and, he added, that about once in seven years the breed of squirrels entirely fails, but that in other seasons they are equally prolific The subject was introduced by his answering to a woman who came in to buy a squirrel, that he had not had one that season, but before that time in the last season he had sold five hundred. It appears that the mere manufacture of squirrel cages for Londoners is no small concern.-W. H.

Harteley Wood, and Long Coppice, and Shrubwood, and Temple Hangers; and in their way back Harteley and Ward le ham Hangers, yet no stag could be found.

The royal pack, accustomed to have the deer turned out before them, never drew the coverts with any address and spirit, as many people that were present observed: and this remark the event has proved to be a true one. For as a person was lately pursuing a pheasant that was wing-broken, in Harteley Wood, he stumbled upon the stag by accident, and ran in upon him as he lay concealed amidst a thick brake of brambles and bushes.

OBSERVATIONS ON INSECTS AND VERMES.

INSECTS IN GENERAL.

THE day and night insects occupy the annuals alternately the Papilios, Musca, and Apes, are succeeded at the close of the day by Phalana, earwigs, woodlice, &c. In the dusk of the evening, when beetles begin to buz, partridges begin to call; these two circumstances are exactly coincident.

Ivy is the last flower that supports the hymenopterous and dipterous insects. On sunny days, quite on to November, they swarm on trees covered with this plant; and when they disappear, probably retire under the shelter of its leaves, concealing themselves between its fibres and the trees which it entwines1.

Spiders, woodlice, Lepismæ in cupboards and among sugar, some Empides, gnats, flies of several species, some Phalanæ in hedges, earthworms, &c. are stirring

This I have often observed, having seen bees and other winged insects swarming about the flowers of the ivy very late in the autumn.— MARKWICK.