their appearance at spring and fall, in their way, perhaps, to the north or south, and was much pleas. ed to see three birds about the usual spot. We shot a cock and a hen; they were plump and in high condition. In their crops was nothing very distinguishable, but somewhat that seemed like blades of vegetables nearly digested. In autumn they feed on haws and yew.berries, and in the spring on ivy.berries. I dressed one of these birds, and found it juicy and well flavoured. It is remarkable that they make but a few days' stay in their spring visit, but rest near a fortnight at Michaelmas. These birds, from the observations of three springs and two autumns, are most punctual in their return, and exhibit a new migration unnoticed by the writers, who supposed they never were to be seen in any of the southern counties.

One of my neighbours lately brought me a new salicaria, which at first I suspected might have proved your willow-lark,* but on a nicer examination it answered much better to the description of that species which you shot at Revesby, in Lincolnshire. My bird I describe thus: "It is a size less than the grasshopper-lark; the head, back, and covert of the wings of a dusky brown, without those dark spots of the grasshopper-lark; over each eye is a milk-white stroke; the chin and throat are white, and the under parts of a yellowish white; the feathers of the tail sharp pointed; the bill is dusky and sharp, and the legs are dusky, the hinder claw long and crooked." The person that shot

* For this salicaria, see Letter XXV., p. 81.

† Sylvia phragmites, Bechst., Sedge-warbler.-SELBY'S OTmith.-W. J.

it says that it sung so like a reed-sparrow that he took it for one, and that it sings all night; but this account merits farther inquiry. For my part, I suspect it is a second sort of locustella, hinted at by Dr. Derham in Ray's Letters (see p. 74). He also procured me a grasshopper-lark.

The question that you put with regard to those genera of animals that are peculiar to America, viz., How they came there, and whence? is too puz. zling for me to answer, and yet so obvious as often to have struck me with wonder. If one looks into the writers on that subject, little satisfaction is to be found. Ingenious men will readily advance plausible arguments to support whatever theory they shall choose to maintain; but then the misfortune is, every one's hypothesis is each as good as another's, since they are all founded on conjecture. The late writers of this sort, in whom may be seen all the arguments of those that have gone before, as I remember, stock America from the western coast of Africa and the south of Europe, and then break down the isthmus that bridged over the Atlantic. But this is making use of a violent piece of machinery: it is a difficulty worthy of the interposi tion of a god! "Incredulus odi."

TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ.

THE NATURALIST'S SUMMER EVENING WALK. "Equidem credo, quia sit divinitus illis

Ingenium."

VIRG., Georg.

WHEN day, declining, sheds a milder gleam, What time the Mayfly* haunts the pool or stream; * The angler's Mayfly, the ephemera vulgata, Linn., comes forth

When the still owl skims round the grassy mead,
What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed.
Then be the time to steal adown the vale,
And listen to the vagrant cuckoo's* tale;

To hear the clamorous curlewt call his mate,
Or the soft quail his tender pain relate;

To see the swallow sweep the dark'ning plain,
Belated, to support her infant train ;
To mark the swift in rapid, giddy ring
Dash round the steeple, unsubdued of wing:
Amusive birds! say, where your hid retreat,
When the frost rages and the tempests beat?
Whence your return, by such nice instinct led,
When Spring, soft season; lifts her bloomy head?
Such baffled searches mock man's prying pride,
The God of Nature is your secret guide!

While deep'ning shades obscure the face of day,
To yonder bench, leaf-sheltered, let us stray,
⚫ Till blended objects fail the swimming sight,
And all the fading landscape sinks in night;
To hear the drowsy dorr come brushing by
With buzzing wing, or the shrill cricket cry;
To see the feeding bat glance through the wood,
To catch the distant falling of the flood;

While o'er the cliff the awaken'd churn-owl hung, Through the still gloom protracts his chattering

song;

from its aurelia state, and emerges out of the water about six in the evening, and dies about eleven at night, determining the date of its fly state in about five or six hours. They usually begin to appear about the 4th of June, and continue in succession for near a fortnight.-See SWAMMERDAM, DERHAM, SCOPOLI, &c.

Vagrant cuckoo; so called, because, being tied down by no incubation or attendance about the nutrition of its young, it wanders without control.

+ Charadrius dicnemus.

t Gryllus campestris.

While, high in air, and poised upon his wings, Unseen, the soft, enamour'd woodlark* sings: These, Nature's works, the curious mind employ, Inspire a soothing, melancholy joy :

As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain

Steals o'er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein! Each rural sight, each sound, each smell com

bine;

;

The tinkling sheepbell, or the breath of kine
The new-mown hay, that scents the swelling breeze,
Or cottage chimney smoking through the trees.

LETTER XXV.

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 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

* In hot summer nights, woodlarks soar to a prodigious height, and hang singing in the air.

the fieldfares, 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 good authority that they are found on Dartmoor, and that they forsake that wild district about the time that our visiters 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. 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 in Ray, who ranges it among his pici affines. It ought, no doubt, to have gone among his avicula caudâ 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 sedgebird. It sings incessantly night and day during the nesting 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 * See p. 78.

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