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. Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken The blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by that fierce weather in January. us. * 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 Anonymiana, p. 469.-MITFORD. In the middle of February, I discovered in my tall hedges, a little bird that raised my curiosity; it was of that yellowgreen colour that belongs to the salicaria kind, and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no parus, and was too long and too big for the golden-crowned wren, appearing most like the largest willow-wren. It hung sometimes with its back downwards, but never continuing one moment in the same place. I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed my aim. I wonder that the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, should be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird; it abounds in all the champaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the antumn. Already they begin clamouring in the evening. They cannot, I think, with any propriety be called, as they are by Mr. Ray, "circa aquas versantes;" for with us (by day at least) they haunt only the most dry, open, upland fields and sheepwalks, far removed from water: what they may do in the night I cannot Worms are their usual food, but they also eat toads and frogs. say. I can show you some good specimens of my new mice. Linnæus, perhaps, would call the species mus minimus. LETTER XVI. TO THE SAME. SELBORNE, April 18, 1768. DEAR SIR,-The history of the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, is as follows: It lays its eggs, usually two, never more than three, on the bare ground, without any nest, in the field, so the countryman in stiring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run immediately from the egg like partridges, &c., and are withdrawn to some flinty field by the dam, where they skulk among the stones, which are their best security; for their feathers are so exactly of the colour of our grey spotted flints, that the most exact ob server, unless he catches the eye of the young bird, may be eluded. The eggs are short and round, of a dirty white, spotted with dark bloody blotches. Though I might not be able, just when I pleased, to procure you a bird, yet I could show you them almost any day; and any evening you may hear them round the village; for they make a clamour which may be heard a mile. Edicnemus is a most apt and expressive name for them, since their legs seem swollen like those of a gouty man. After harvest, I have shot them before the pointers in turnip fields. I make no doubt but there are three species of the willowwrens; two I know perfectly, but have not been able yet to procure the third. No two birds can differ more in their notes, and that constantly, than those two that I am acquainted with; for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note, the other a harsh loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and three-quarters of an inch longer, and weighs two drachms and a half, while the latter weighs but two; so that the songster is one-fifth heavier than the chirper. The chirper (being the first summer bird of passage that is heard, the wryneck sometimes excepted) begins his notes in the middle of March, and continues them through the spring and summer, till the end of August, as appears by * Mr. White clearly distinguishes three species of these little birds; and he seems to have had some idea of a fourth: but on this point there is a confusion in the entries in the Naturalist's Calendar, which has perhaps arisen from his having used different names for the same bird in noting down his observations in different years. The small uncrested wren of the calendar, appearing on the 9th of March, is called in the Natural History, p. 84, the chirper, and is said to have black legs: it must be either sylvia rufa or sylv. loquax; I believe the former, for I doubt the fact of sylv. loquax, the chiffchaff, which seems not to reach the north of England, arriving so early. The third entry in the Calendar, second willow or laughing wren, is certainly sylv. trochilus; because he says in the Natural History, p. 82, that the songster has a laughing note. The fourth entry, large shivering wren, is unquestionably sylv. sylvicola. It appears to me that the second and fifth entries, middle yellow wren, and middle willow wren, mean the same thing as second willow wren, and refer alike to sylv. trochilus; but it is possible that at a later period than the date of Letter xix. written in 1768, he may have suspected the existence of a fourth species.-W. H. There has hitherto existed very great confusion in the works of British and foreign naturalists concerning the four nearly allied species of wrens, which Mr. W. Herbert has satisfactorily cleared up in his very elaborate note on the subject, printed in Bennett's edition.-ED. |