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What you suggest, with regard to Spain, is highly probable. The
winters of Andalusia are so mild, that, in all likelihood, the soft-
billed birds that leave us at that season may find insects sufficient
to support them there.

Some young man, possessed of fortune, health, and leisure, should
make an autumnal voyage into that kingdom; and should spend a
year there, investigating the natural history of that vast country. Mr.
Willughby * passed through that kingdom on such an errand; but
he seems to have skirted along in a superficial manner and an ill
humour, being much disgusted at the rude, dissolute manners of the
people.
(* See Ray's Travels, p. 466.)

I have no friend left now at Sunbury to apply to about the swallows
roosting on the aits of the Thames: nor can I hear any more about
those birds which I suspected were merulae torquatae,.

As to the small mice, I have farther to remark, that though they
hang their nests for breeding up amidst the straws of the standing
corn, above the ground; yet I find that, in the winter, they burrow
deep in the earth, and make warm beds of grass: but their grand
rendezvous seems to be in corn-ricks, into which they are carried at
harvest. A neighbour housed an oat-rick lately, under the thatch of
which were assembled near an hundred, most of which were taken;
and some I saw. I measured them; and found that, from nose to tail,
they were just two inches and a quarter, and their tails just two
inches long. Two of them in a scale, weighed down just one copper
halfpenny, which is about a third of an ounce avoirdupois: so that I
suppose they are the smallest quadrupeds in this island. A full-
grown mus medius domesticus weighs, I find, one ounce, lumping
weight, which is more than six times as much as the mouse above;
and measures from nose to rump four inches and a quarter, and the
same in its tail.

We have had a very severe frost and deep snow this month. My
thermometer was one day fourteen degrees and a half below the
freezing point, within doors. The tender evergreens were injured
pretty much. It was very providential that the air was still, and the
ground well covered with snow, else vegetation in general must
have suffered prodigiously. There is reason to believe that some
days were more severe than any since the year 1739-40.

I am, etc., etc.

Letter XIV
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire

Selborne, March 12, 1768.

Dear Sir,

If some curious gentleman would procure the head of a fallow-
deer, and have it dissected, he would find it furnished with two
spiracula, or breathing-places, beside the nostrils; probably
analogous to the puncta lachrymalia in the human head. When the
deer are thirsty they plunge their noses, like some horses, very deep
under water, while in the act of drinking, and continue them in that
situation for a considerable time, but, to obviate any
inconvenience, they can open two vents, one at the inner corner of
each eye, having a communication with the nose. Here seems to be
an extraordinary provision of nature worthy our attention; and
which has not, that I know of, been noticed by any naturalist. For it
looks as if these creatures would not be suffocated, though both
their mouths and nostrils were stopped. This curious formation of
the head may be of singular service to beasts of chase, by affording
them free respiration: and no doubt these additional nostrils are
thrown open when they are hard run.* Mr. Ray observed that, at
Malta, the owners slit up the nostrils of such asses as were hard
worked: for they, being naturally strait or small, did not admit air
sufficient serve them when they travelled or laboured in that hot
climate. And we know that grooms, and gentlemen of the turf,
think large nostrils necessary, and a perfection, in hunters and
running horses.
(* In answer to this account, Mr. Pennant sent me the following
curious and pertinent reply:--'I was much surprised to find in the
antelope something analogous to what you mention as so
remarkable in deer. This animal has a long slit beneath each eye,
which can be opened and shut at pleasure. On holding an orange to
one, the creature made as much use of those orifices as of his
nostrils, applying them to the fruit, and seeming to smell it through
them.')

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

Quadrifidae nares, quadruplices ad respirationem canales.
Opp. Cyn. lib. ii. 1. 181.

Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say that goats
breathe at their ears; whereas he asserts just the contrary:
'Alcmaeon 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 Thomas Pennant, Esquire

Selborne, Mark 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.

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 Brat. 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 had 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 hemp-
seed. 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 eaten
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 searched it out. The root of the arum is remarkably
warm and pungent.

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

In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, a little
bird that raised my curiosity: it was of that yellow-green colour that
belongs to the salicaria kind, and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no
paws, 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
campaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all
the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the autumn.
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 sheep walks, far removed from
water. What they may do in the night I cannot say. Worms are their
usual food, but they also eat toads and frogs.

I can show you some good specimens of my new mice. Linnaeus,
perhaps, would call the species mus minimus.

Letter XVI
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire

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 that the countryman,
in stirring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run
immediately from the egg like partridges, etc., and are withdrawn
to some flinty field by their 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
observer, 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. Oedicnemus is a
most apt and expressive name for them, since their legs seem
sworn 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 willow-wrens:
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
constancy, 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 drams and a half; while the latter weighs but two:
so 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 two notes in the middle of March,
and continues them through the spring and summer till the end of
August, as appears by my journals. The legs of the larger of these
two are flesh-coloured; of the less, black.

The grasshopper-lark began his sibilous note in my fields last
Saturday. Nothing can be more amusing than the whisper of this
little bird, which seems to be close by though at an hundred yards
distance; and, when close at your ear, is scarce any louder than
when a great way oil.. Had I not been a little acquainted with
insects, and known that the grasshopper kind is not yet hatched, I
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 a 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 a 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
Philosophical Letters, p. 108.

The fly-catcher (stoparola) has not yet appeared: 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, etc., 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:

Smallest willow-wren, Linnaei Nomina Motacilla
trochilus.
Wryneck, Lynx torquilla.
House-swallow, Hirundo
rustica.
Martin, Hirundo urbica.
Sand-martin, Hirundo riparia
.
Cuckoo, Cuculus
canorus.
Nightingale, Motacilla
luscinia.
Black-cap, Motacilla
atricapilla.
White-throat, Motacilla
sylvia.
Middle willow-wren, Motacilla
trochilus.
Swift, Hirundo apus.
Stone curlew? Charadrius
oedicnemus?
Turtle-dove? Turtur
aldrovandi?
Grasshopper-lark, Alauda trivialis.
Landrail, Rallus crex.
Largest willow-wren, Motacilla
trochilus.
Redstart, Motacilla
phoenicurus.
Goat-sucker, or fern-owl, Caprimulgus
europaeus.
Fly-catcher, Muscicapa
grisola.

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 nut-hatch). Mr. Ray says that the less spotted
woodpecker does the same. This noise may be heard a furlong or
more.

Now is the only time to ascertain the short-winged summer birds;
for, when the leaf is out, 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.

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 a 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 lice a titmouse, with its back
downwards.

Yours, etc., etc.

Letter XVII
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire

Selborne, June 18, 1768.

Dear Sir,

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, sometimes analogous to that of the cryptogamia in the
sexual system of plants: and the case is the same as regards some
of the fishes: as the eel, etc.

The method in which toads procreate and bring forth seems to me
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 forth. Perhaps
they may be ' eso men ootokoi, exo de dzootokoi,(in Greek), as is
known to be the case with the viper.

The copulation of frogs (or at least the appearance of it; for
Swammerdam proves that the male has no penis intrans) is
notorious to everybody: because we see them sticking upon each
other's backs for a month together in spring: and yet I never saw, or
read, of toads being observed in the same situation. It is strange
that the matter with regard to the venom of toads has not yet been
settled. That they are not noxious to some animals is plain: for
ducks, buzzards, owls, stone curlews, and snakes, eat them, to my
knowledge, with impunity. And I well remember the time, but was
not eye-witness to the fact (though numbers of persons were),
when a quack, at this village, ate a toad to make the country people
stare; afterwards he drank oil.

I have been informed also, from undoubted authority, that some
ladies (ladies you will say of peculiar taste) took a fancy to a toad,
which they nourished summer after summer, for many years, till he
grew to a monstrous size, with the maggots which turn to flesh
flies. The reptile used to come forth every evening from an hole
under the garden-steps; and was taken up, after supper, on the table
to be fed. But at last a tame raven, kenning him as he put forth his
head, gave him such a severe stroke with his horny beak as put out
one eye. After this accident the creature languished for some time
and died.

I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive reading of the
excellent account there is from Mr. Derham, in Ray's Wisdom of
God in the Creation (p. 365), concerning the migration of frogs
from their breeding ponds. In this account he at once subverts that
foolish opinion of their dropping from the clouds in rain; showing
that it is from the grateful coolness and moisture of those showers
that they are tempted to set out on their travels, which they defer
till those fall. Frogs are as yet in their tadpole state; but in a few
weeks, our lanes, paths, fields, will swarm for a few days with
myriads of these emigrants, no larger than my little finger nail.
Swammerdam gives a most accurate account of the method and
situation in which the male impregnates the spawn of the female.
How wonderful is the oeconomy of Providence with regard to the
limbs of so vile a reptile! While it is aquatic it has a fish-like tail,
and no legs: as soon as the legs sprout, the tail drops off as useless,
and the animal betakes itself to the land.

Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances that the rana
arborea is an English reptile; it abounds in Germany and
Switzerland.

It is to be remembered that the salamandra aquatica of Ray (the
water-newt or eft) will frequently bite at the angler's bait, and is
often caught on his hook. I used to take it for granted that the
salamandra aquatica was hatched, lived, and died in the water. But
John Ellis, Esq., F.R.S. (the coralline Ellis), asserts, in a letter to
the Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, in his account of the mud
inguana, an amphibious bides, from South Carolina, that the water-
eft, or newt, is only the larva of the land-eft, as tadpoles are of
frogs. Lest I should be suspected to misunderstand his meaning, I
shall give it in his own words. Speaking of the opercula or covering
to the gills of the mud inguana, he proceeds to say that 'The forms
of these pennated coverings approach very near to what I have
some time ago observed in the larva or aquatic state of our English
lacerta, known by the name of eft, or newt; which serve them for
coverings to their gills, and for fins to swim with while in this
state; and which they lose, as well as the fins of their tails, when
they change their state, and become land animals, as I have
observed, by keeping them alive for some time myself:'

Linnaeus, in his Systema Naturae, hints at what Mr. Ellis advances
more than once.

Providence has been so indulgent to us as to allow of but one
venomous reptile of the serpent kind in these kingdoms, and that is
the viper. As you propose the good of mankind to be an object of
your publications, you will not omit to mention common salad-oil
as a sovereign remedy against the bite of the viper. As to the blind
worm (anguis fragilis, so called because it snaps in sunder with a
small blow), I have found, on examination, that it is perfectly
innocuous. A neighbouring yeoman (to whom I am indebted for
some good hints) killed and opened a female viper about the
twenty-seventh of May: he found her filled with a chain of eleven
eggs, about the size of those of a blackbird; but none of them were
advanced so far towards a state of maturity as to contain any
rudiments of young. Though they are oviparous, yet they are
viviparous also, hatching their young within their bellies, and then
bringing them forth. Whereas snakes lay chains of eggs every
summer in my melon beds, in spite of all that my people can do to
prevent them; which eggs do not hatch till the spring following, as
I have often experienced. Several intelligent folks assure me that
they have seen the viper open her mouth and admit her helpless
young down her throat on sudden surprises, just as the female
opossum does her brood into the pouch under her belly, upon the
like emergencies and yet the London viper-catchers insist on it, to
Mr. Barrington, that no such thing ever happens. The serpent kind
eat, I believe, but once in a year; or rather, but only just at one
season of the year. Country people talk much of a water-snake, but
I am pretty sure, without any reason; for the common snake
(coluber natrix) delights much to sport in the water, perhaps with a
view to procure frogs and other food.

I cannot well guess how you are to make out your twelve species of
reptiles, unless it be by the various species, or rather varieties, of
our lacerti, of which Ray enumerates five. I have not had an
opportunity of ascertaining these; but remember well to have seen,
formerly, several beautiful green lacerti on the sunny sandbanks
near Farnham, in Surrey; and Ray admits there are such in Ireland.

Letter XVIII
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire

Selborne, July 27, 1768.

Dear Sir,

I received your obliging and communicative letter of June the 28th,
while I was on a visit at a gentleman's house, where I had neither
books to turn to, nor leisure to sit down, to return you an answer to
many queries, which I wanted to resolve in the best manner that I
am able.

A person, by my order, has searched our brooks, but could find no
such fish as the gasterosteus pungitius: he found the gasterosteus
aculeatus in plenty. This morning, in a basket, I packed a little
earthen pot full of wet moss, and in it some sticklebacks, male and
female; the females big with spawn: some lamperns; some bull's
heads; but I could produce no minnows. This basket will be in
Fleet-street by eight this evening; so I hope Mazel will have them
fresh and fair to-morrow morning. I gave some directions, in a
letter, to what particulars the engraver should be attentive.

Finding, while I was on a visit, that I was within a reasonable
distance of Ambresbury, I sent a servant over to that town, and
procured several diving specimens of loaches, which he brought,
safe and brisk, in a glass decanter. They were taken in the gullies
that were cut for watering the meadows. From these fishes (which
measured from two to four inches in length) I took the following
description: 'The loach, in its general aspect, has a pellucid
appearance: its back is mottled with irregular collections of small
black dots, not reaching much below the linea lateralis, as are the
back and tail fins: a black line runs from each eye down to the
nose; its belly is of a silvery white; the upper jaw projects beyond
the lower, and is surrounded with six feelers, three on each side; its
pectoral fins are large, its ventral much smaller; the fin behind its
anus small; its dorsal fin large, containing eight spines; its tail,
where it joins to the tail-fin, remarkably broad, without any
taperness, so as to be characteristic of this genus: the tail-fin is
broad, and square at the end. From the breadth and muscular
strength of the tail, it appears to be an active nimble fish.'

In my visit I was not very far from Hungerford, and did not forget
to make some inquiries concerning the wonderful method of curing
cancers by means of toads. Several intelligent persons, both gentry
and clergy, do, I find, give a great deal of credit to what was
asserted in the papers: and I myself dined with a clergyman who
seemed to be persuaded that what is related is matter of fact; but,
when I came to attend to his account, I thought I discerned
circumstances which did not a little invalidate the woman's story of
the manner in which she came by her skill. She says of herself 'that,
labouring under a virulent cancer, she went to some church where
there was a vast crowd: on going into a pew, she was accosted by a
strange clergyman; who, after expressing compassion for her
situation, told her chat if she would make such an application of
living toads as is mentioned she would be well.' Now is it likely
that this unknown gentleman should express so much tenderness
for this single sufferer, and not feel any for the many thousands
that daily languish under this terrible disorder? Would he not have
made use of this invaluable nostrum for his own emolument; or, at
least, by some means of publication or other, have found a method
of making it public for the good of mankind ? In short, this woman
(as it appears to me) having set up for a cancer-doctress, finds it
expedient to amuse the country with this dark and mysterious
relation.

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