Page:White - The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.djvu/92

 day during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a sky-lark; and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your fen salicaria, shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent characteristic of it when he says, 'Rostrum & pedes in hac avicula multo majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione.' See letter May 29, 1769.

I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stone curlew, which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground: There were two; but the fender inadvertently crushed one with his foot before he saw them.

When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had not forgot to mention the faculty that snakes have of stinking se defendendo. I knew a gentleman who kept a tame snake, which was in its person as sweet as any animal while in a good humour and unalarmed; but as soon as a stranger or a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and filled the room with such nauseous effluvia as rendered it hardly supportable. Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Ray's Synop. Ouadr. is an innocuous and sweet animal; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such a pestilent and fetid smell and excrement, that nodding can be more horrible.

A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the lanius minor cinerascens cum macula 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 Edwards's drawing.

Letter XXVI To Thomas Pennant, Esquire