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the turf, think large nostrils necessary, and a perfection, in hunters and running horses.

Oppian, the Greek poet, by the following line, seems to have had some notion that stags have four spiracula :

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Τετράδυμοι ῥινὲς, πίσυρες πνοίῃσι δίαυλοι.
Quadupartite nostrils, four respiratory passages."
OPP. Cyn. Lib. ii. 1. 181.

Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say,

against the hand, either thrusting it repeatedly, or rubbing it. The peculiar odour is freely imparted to the substance rubbed, but seems to offer no special attraction to his senses: he neither smells to it remarkably, nor licks it. The second male, whose horns have about three-fourths of their full growth, and whose rich colours are only less deep than those of his more aged neighbour, acts in a similar manner. His suborbital sinus, though strongly developed, is not so extensive as that of the older animal: in its quiet state it is scarcely completely closed, so thick are its lips; in its condition of excitement it is widely expanded. The animal then thrusts it at the offered hand; but does not exhibit an equal readiness to rub it. The youngest male is evidently immature; its horns have only commenced making their first spiral turn, and its colour is the fawn of the female, with her pale stripe along the side: for in the Indian antelope, as in most animals in which the adult males differ in colour from the females, the young of both sexes are similarly coloured and resemble the dam. In this individual the suborbital sinus is small; its lips are closely applied to each other; and they are but slightly moved when the animal is interested; if he uses his nose, the sac is called into moderate action. He cares little for the odour of his older relatives. The remaining specimen was probably of nearly the same age with this younger male when that occurred which, while it allowed of the animal's increasing in bulk, checked the development of the external characters that belong to the mature male. Its advance towards perfection was arrested while the female livery of the young animal was yet retained, and its colour is the fawn of the female with the side marked lengthways by her paler line. Its horn too, normal in its character, as far as a point corresponding with the early part of the first spiral turn, and about this point regularly ringed, afterwards loses the form characteristic of the species, and instead of being completed by a continuous series of spiral turns, surrounded by strongly marked rings, becomes smooth, continues slender, and is directed backwards in one single large sweep, forming a horn altogether monstrous, and one which is sheep-like, though infinitely weak, rather than antelopine: only one such horn remains. In this animal the suborbital sinus is not more developed than in the youngest and immature male, and it is quite unused: the sinus is little more than a mark existing in the ordinary situation, and no motion whatever is observed in its lips; it is not applied to any substance brought near to it, the nose being usually employed. A finger loaded with the secretion from the sac of the mature male is smelt to by this individual, and is then freely licked; perhaps on account of its saltness alone, but probably

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that goats breathe at their ears, whereas he asserts just the contrary :-Αλκμαίων γὰρ οὐκ ἀληθῆ λέγει, φάμενος ἀναπνεῖν τὰς αἶγας κατὰ τα ὠτά. "Alemæon does not advance what is true, when he avers that goats breathe through their ears.". History of Animals, Book i. chap. xi.

LETTER XV.

TO THE SAME.

SELBORNE, March 30, 1768. DEAR SIR,-Some 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.*

also on account of some other and peculiar attraction. The same cause which induced the retention by this individual of the immature colours, and which arrested the perfect growth of the horns, has also, I do not hesitate in believing, checked the development of the suborbital sinuses and rendered them useless.

I am not disposed, on this occasion, to enter farther into the speculations which might be founded on the facts just recorded with respect to the suborbital sinus in the Indian antelope; and I quit the subject, for the present, with the remark that they seem to me to justify the observation with which I commenced. More numerous facts, and more full consideration of them, will determine before long the degree of value that should be attached to this view of the subject.

By a letter which I have just received from Mr. Hodgson, I find that he has has had his attention excited by the observation of the antelopes which he has kept alive in Nepaul; and that he also has been led to the conclusion that there exists a relation between these sinuses and their secretions and the other functions referred to. His continued observation, favourably as he is circumstanced for the acquisition of information on all subjects of Nepaulese zoology, will doubtless tend to elucidate this yet unsettled point, on which Dr. Jacob, at the meeting of the British Association in Dublin, in 1835, laid before the members assembled some valuable observations.-E. T. B.]

*The cane is the common weasel. It is the provincial name for it.-ED.

A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milk-white 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 surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws, were milk-white.*

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 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 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 scratched it out. The root of the arum is remarkably warm and pungent.

us.

Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken The blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by that fierce weather in January.

* Mr. Yarrell informs us that white, pied, and cream-coloured varieties of the rook occasionally occur. I have seen three white blackbirds from one nest, at Blackheath. Also, a white sparrow and a cream-coloured woodcock killed in Sussex.-ED.

Mr. White has justly remarked, that food has great influence on the colour of animals. The dark colour in wild birds is a great safeguard to them against their enemies; and this is the reason that, among birds of bright plumage, the young do not assume their gay colours till the second or third year, as the cygnet, the gold and silver pheasants, &c. The remarkable change of plumage among the gull tribe, is a curious and intricate subject. Is the circumstance mentioned by Mr. Pegge true," that butterflies partake of the colour of the flowers they feed on?" I think not. See Anonymianu, p. 469.-MITFORD.

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