should have hardly believed but that it had been a locusta whispering in the bushes. The country people laugh when you tell them that it is the note of a bird. It is the most artful creature, skulking in the thickest part of a bush, and will sing at a yard distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to get a person to go on the other side of the hedge where it haunted; and then it would run, creeping like a mouse before us for an hundred yards together, through the bottom of the thorns, yet it would not come into fair sight; but in a morning early, and when undisturbed, it sings on the top of a twig, gaping, and shivering with its wings. Mr Ray himself had no knowledge of this bird, but received his account from Mr Johnson, who apparently confounds it with the reguli non cristati, from which it is very distinct. See Ray's Philos. Letters, p. 108.

The fly-catcher (stoparola) has not yet appear. ed; it usually breeds in my vine. The redstart begins to sing; its note is short and imperfect, but is continued till about the middle of June. The willow-wrens (the smaller sort) are horrid pests in a garden, destroying the pease, cherries, currants, &c., and are so tame that a gun will not scare them.

A List of the Summer Birds of Passage discovered in this neighbourhood, ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear :

Linnæi Nomina.

Motacilla trochilus.

Jynx torquilla.

Hirundo rustica.

Martin,

Sand-martin

Hirundo urbica.

Hirundo riparia

My countrymen talk much of a bird that makes a clatter with its bill against a dead bough, or some old pales, calling it a jar-bird. I procured one to be shot in the very fact; it proved to be the sitta europaea (the nuthatch). Mr Ray says, that the less spotted woodpecker does the same. This noise may be heard a furlong or more.*

*The nuthatch, sitta europea, Linn., is the only species of the genus inhabiting Europe; in this country it appears confined to England, never having been traced farther north than Northumberland. The following animated sketch, a good deal in the style of our author, I have extracted from Loudon's Journal of Natural History, as giving a correct idea of the manners of this curious species:-"I had never seen the little bird called the nuthatch, when one day, when I was expecting the transit of some wood-pigeons under a birch tree, with my gun in my hand, I observed a little ash-coloured bird squat himself on one of the large lateral trunks over my head, and after some observation, begin to tap loudly, or rather solidly, upon the wood, and then proceed round and round the branch, it being clearly the same thing to him whether his nadir er zenith were uppermost. I shot, and the bird fell; there was a lofty hedge between us, and when I got over, he had removed himself. It was some time before I secured him; and I

Now is the only time to ascertain the shortwinged summer birds; for, when the leaf is out,

mention this, because the manner in which he eluded me, was characteristic of his cunning. He concealed himself in holes at the bottom of a ditch, so long as he heard the noise of motion; and when all was still, he would scud out and attempt to escape. A wing was broken, and I at length got hold of him. He proved small, but very fierce, and his bite would have made a child cry out. The elbow-joint of his wing being thoroughly shattered, and finding that he had no other wound, I cut off the dangling limb, and put him into a large cage with a common lark. The wound did not in the least diminish his activity, nor yet his pug. nacity, for he instantly began to investigate all means of escape; he tried the bores, then tapped the woodwork of the cage, and produced a knocking sound, which made the room re-echo; but after finding his efforts vain, he then turned upon the lark, ran under him with his gaping beak to bite, and effectually alarmed his far more gentle and elegant antagonist. Compelled to separate them, the nuthatch

for this bird I discovered him to be, by turning over the leaves of an Ornithologia was put into a smaller cage of plain oakwood and wire. Here he remained all night; and the next morning his knocking, or tapping with his beak, was the first sound I heard, though sleeping in an apart ment divided from the other by a landing place. He had food given to him, minced chicken and bread crumbs, and water. He ate and drank with a most perfect impudence, and the moment he had satisfied himself, turned again to his work of battering the frame of his cage, the sound from which, both in loudness and prolongation of noise, is only to be compared to the efforts of a fashionable footman upon a fashionable door, in a fashionable square. He had a particular fancy for the extremities of the corner pillars of the cage; on these he spent his most elaborate taps, and at this moment, though he only occupied the cage a day, the wood is pierced and worn like a piece of old worm-eaten timber. He probably had an idea, that if these main-beams could once be penetrated, the rest of the superstructure would fall and free him. Against the doorway he had also a particular spite, and once succeeded in opening it; and when,

there is no making any remarks on such a restless tribe; and, when once the young begin to appear, it is all confusion; there is no distinction of genus, species, or sex.

to interpose a farther obstacle, it was tied in a double knot with a string, the perpetual application of his beak quickly unloosed it. In ordinary cages, a circular hole is left in the wire for the bird to insert his head to drink from a glass; to this hole the nuthatch constantly repaired, not for the purpose of drinking, but to try to push out more than his head but in vain, for he is a thick bird, and rather heavily built; but the instant he found the hole too small, he would withdraw his head, and begin to dig and hammer at the circle, where it is rooted in the wood, with his pickaxe of a beak, evidently with a design to enlarge the orifice. His labour was incessant, and he ate as largely as he worked; and, I fear, it was the united effects of both that killed him. His hammering was peculiarly laborious, for he did not peck as other birds do, but, grasping his hold with his immense feet, he turned upon them as upon a pivot, and struck with the whole weight of his body-thus assuming the appearance, with his entire form, of the head of a hammer; or, as I have sometimes seen birds, in mechanical clocks, made to strike the hour by swinging on a wheel. We were in hopes that when the sun went down, he would cease from his labours, and rest; but no; at the interval of every ten minutes, up to nine or ten in the night, he resumed his krocking, and strongly reminded us of the coffin-maker's nightly and dreary occupation. It was said by one of us, he is nailing his own coffin;' and so it proved. An awful fluttering in the cage, now covered with a handkerchief, an nounced that something was wrong; and we found him at the bottom of his prison, with his feathers ruffled and nearly all turned back. He was taken out, and for some time he lingered away in convulsions, and occasional brightenings up. At length he drew his last gasp; and will it be believed, that tears were shed on his demise? The fact is, that the apparent intelligence of his character, the speculation in his eye, the assiduity of his labour, and his most extraordinary fearlessness and familiarity, though coupled with fierceness, gave us a consideration for him that may

In breeding-time, snipes play over the moors, piping and humming; they always hum as they are descending. Is not their hum ventriloquous, like that of the turkey? Some suspect it is made by their wings.

This morning I saw the golden-crowned wren, whose crown glitters like burnished gold. It often hangs, like a titmouse, with its back downwards.

XVII.

On Wednesday last arrived your agreeable letter of June the 10th. It gives me great satisfaction to find that you pursue these studies still with such vigour, and are in such forwardness with regard to reptiles and fishes.

The reptiles, few as they are, I am not acquainted with, so well as I could wish, with regard to their natural history. There is a degree of dubiousness and obscurity attending the propagation of this class of animals, something analogous to that of the cryptogamia in the sexual system of plants; and the case is the same with regard to some of the fishes, as the eel, &c.

The method in which toads procreate and bring forth, seems to be very much in the dark. Some authors say that they are viviparous; and yet Ray classes them among his oviparous animals, and is silent with regard to the manner of their bringing

appear ridiculous to those who have never so nearly obser. ved the ways of an animal as to feel interested in its fater With us it was different."W. J.