of your fen-salicaria shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent characteristic of it when he says, "Rostrum et pedes in hac aviculâ multo majores sunt quàm pro corporis ratione."*

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 inad. vertently crushed one with his foot before he saw them.

A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the lanius minor cinerascens cum maculâ in scapulis alba, Raii, which is a bird that, at the time of your publishing your two first volumes of British Zoology, I find you had not seen. You have described it well from Edward's drawing.

LETTER XXVI.

Selborne, Dec. 8, 1769.

DEAR SIR, I WAS much gratified by your com. municative letter on your return from Scotland, where you spent, I find, some considerable time, and gave yourself good room to examine the natural curiosities of that extensive kingdom, both those of the islands as well as those of the Highlands. The usual bane of such expeditions is hurry, because men seldom allot themselves half the time they should do; but, fixing on a day for their return, post from place to place rather as if they were on a journey that required despatch, than as philosophers

* The beak and feet in this little bird are much too large in proportion to the body.

investigating the works of nature. You must have made, no doubt, many discoveries, and laid up a good fund of materials for a future edition of the British Zoology, and will have no reason to repent that you have bestowed so much pains on a part of Great Britain that perhaps was never so well examined before.

1

It has always been matter of wonder to me that fieldfares, which are so congenerous to thrushes and blackbirds, should never choose to lay their eggs in England: but that they should not think even the Highlands cold and northerly, and sequestered enough, is a circumstance still more strange and wonderful. The ringousel, you find, stays in Scotland the whole year round, so that we have reason to conclude that those migrators that visit us for a short space every autumn do not come from thence.

And here, I think, will be the proper place to mention, that those birds were most punctual again in their migration this autumn, appearing, as before, about the 30th of September; but their flocks were larger than common, and their stay protracted somewhat beyond the usual time. If they come to spend the whole winter with us, as some of their congeners do, and then left us as they do in spring, I should not be so much struck with the occurrence, since it would be similar to that of the other winter birds of passage; but when I see them for a fortnight at Michaelmas, and again for about a week in the middle of April, I am seized with wonder, and long to be informed whence these travellers come, and whither they go, since they seem to use our hills merely as an inn or baiting-place.

Your account of the greater brambling, or snow. fleck, is very amusing; and strange it is that such a short-winged bird should delight in such perilous voyages over the Northern Ocean! Some country people in the winter time have every now and then told me that they have seen two or three white larks on our downs; but, on considering the matter, I began to suspect that these are some stragglers of the birds we are talking of, which sometimes, perhaps, may rove so far to the southward.

It pleases me to find that white hares are so fre. quent on the Scottish mountains, and especially as you inform me that it is a distinct species; for the quadrupeds of Britain are so few that every new species is a great acquisition.

The eagle-owl, could it be proved to belong to us, is so majestic a bird that it would grace our fauna much.

You admit, I find, that I have proved your fen. salicaria to be the lesser reed-sparrow of Ray: and I think you may be secure that I am right; for I took very particular pains to clear up that matter, and had some fair specimens ; but, as they were not well preserved, they are decayed already. You will, no doubt, insert it in its proper place in your next edition. Your additional plates will much improve your work.

De Buffon, I know, has described the water shrewmouse; but still I am pleased to find you have discovered it in Lincolnshire, for the reason I have given in the article of the white hare.

As a neighbour was lately ploughing in a dry chalky field, far removed from any water, he turned out a water-rat, that was curiously laid up in a

hybernaculum, artificially formed of grass and leaves. At one end of the burrow lay above a gallon of potatoes regularly stowed, on which it was to have supported itself for the winter. But the difficulty with me is how this amphibius mus came to fix its winter station at such a distance from the water. Was it determined in its choice of that place by the mere accident of finding the potatoes which were planted there? or is it the constant practice of the aquatic rat to forsake the neighbourhood of the water in the colder months?

Though I delight very little in analogous reasoning, knowing how fallacious it is with respect to natural history, yet in the following instance I cannot help being inclined to think it may conduce towards the explanation of a difficulty that I have mentioned before, with respect to the invariable early retreat of the hirundo apus, or swift, so many weeks before its congeners; and that not only with us, but also in Andalusia, where they also begin to retire about the beginning of August.

The great large bat (which, by-the-by, is at present a nondescript in England, and what I have never been able yet to procure) retires or migrates very early in the summer: it also ranges very high for its food, feeding in a different region of the air; and that is the reason I never could procure one.* Now this is exactly the case with the swifts; for they take their food in a more exalted region than the other species, and are very seldom seen hawking for flies near the ground or over the surface of the water. From hence I would conclude that these

* Mr. White first noticed the existence of this species of bat in England.

hirundines and the larger bats are supported by some sorts of high-flying gnats, scarabs, or phalana, that are of short continuance, and that the short stay of these strangers is regulated by the defect of their food.

By my journal it appears that curlews clamoured on to October the thirty-first, since which I have not seen or heard any. Swallows were observed on to November the third.

LETTER XXVII.

Selborne, Feb. 22, 1770. DEAR SIR, HEDGEHOGS abound in my gardens and fields. The manner in which they eat the roots of the plantain in my grasswalk is very curious: with their upper mandible, which is much longer than their lower, they bore under the plant,

and so eat the root off upward, leaving the tuft of leaves untouched. In this respect they are serviceable, as they destroy a very troublesome weed; but they deface the walks in some measure by dig-,