Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/259

Rh appearance. Dabchicks, moor-hens, and coots, fly erect, with their legs hanging down, and hardly make any dispatch; the reason is plain, their wings are placed too forward out of the true centre of gravity; as the legs of auks and divers are situated too backward.

.

1The flight of the heron seems particularly slow, yet the beats of its wings average one hundred and twenty in a minute, and it makes very rapid progress.

LETTER XLIII.

, Sept. 9th, 1778.

,—From the motion of birds, the transition is natural enough to their notes and language, of which I shall say something. Not that I would pretend to understand their language like the vizier; who, by the recital of a conversation which passed