Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/81

Rh $e3$ The golden-crested wren suspends its deep purse-like nest beneath some thick fir branch, and lays a number of tiny yellow-brown eggs, like green-peas in size. All the winter through this wren and the long-tailed tit frequented the hedgerows and coppices in Shropshire, and were frequent victims to a school-boy's love of chevying.

  LETTER XVII.

, June 18th, 1768.

, On Wednesday last arrived your agreeable letter of June 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, something analogous to that of the cryptogamia in the sexual system of plants: and the case is the same with regard to some of the fishes; as the eel, etc.

The method in which toads procreate and bring forth seems to be 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, 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 the 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 been yet 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 eyewitness to the fact (though numbers of persons were) when 