Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/106

84 where there is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and day during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark; 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 et pedes in hâc aviculâ multò majores sunt quâm pro corporis ratione." See letter, May 29th, 1769. (Preceding letter, )

I have got you the egg of an œdicnemus, or stone-curlew, which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground; there were two, but the finder 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 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. Quadr." is an innocuous and sweet animal; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such a most pestilent and fetid smell and excrement, that nothing can be more horrible.

A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the lanius minor cinerascens cum maculâ in scapulis albâ, 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.

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