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.
The water-eft has not, that I can discern, the least appearance of any
gills; for want of which it is continually rising to the surface of the
water to take in fresh air. I opened a big-bellied one indeed, and
found it full of spawn. Not that this circumstance at all invalidates
the assertion that they are larvae: for the larvae of insects are full
of eggs, which they exclude the instant they enter their last state.
The water-eft is continually climbing over the brims of the vessel,
within which we keep it in water, and wandering away: and people every
summer see numbers crawling out of the pools where they are hatched, up
the dry banks. There are varieties of them, differing colour; and some
have fins up their tail and back, and some have not.
Letter XIX
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, Aug. 17, 1768.
Dear Sir,
I have now, past dispute, made out three distinct species of the
willow-wrens (motacillae trochili) which constantly and invariably use
distinct notes. But, at the same time, I am obliged to confess that I
know nothing of your willow-lark.* In my letter of April the 18th, I
told you peremptorily that I knew your willow-lark, but had not seen it
then: but, when I came to procure it, it proved, in all respects, a
very motacilla trochilus; only that it is a size larger than the two
other, and the yellow-green of the whole upper part of the body is more
vivid, and the belly of a clearer white. I have specimens of the three
sorts now lying before me; and can discern that there are three
gradations of sizes, and that the least has black legs, and the other
two flesh-coloured ones. The yellowest bird is considerably the
largest, and has its quill-feathers and secondary feathers tipped with
white, which the others have not. This last haunts only the tops of
trees in high beechen woods, and makes a sibilous grasshopper-like
noise, now and then, at short intervals, shivering a little with its
wings when it sings; and is, I make no doubt now, the regulus non
cristatus of Ray, which he says ‘cantat voce stridula locustae.’ Yet
this great ornithologist never suspected that there were three species.
* Brit. Zool. edit. 1776, octavo, p. 381.
Letter XX
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, October 8, 1768.
It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full,
that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most
examined. Several birds, which are said to belong to the north only,
are, it seems, often in the south. I have discovered this summer three
species of birds with us, which writers mention as only to be seen in
the northern counties. The first that was brought me (on the 14th of
May) was the sandpiper, tringa hypoleucus: it was a cock bird, and
haunted the banks of some ponds near the village; and, as it had a
companion, doubtless intended to have bred near that water. Besides,
the owner has told me since, that, on recollection, he has seen some of
the same birds round his ponds in former summers.
The next bird that I procured (on the 21st of May) was a male
red-backed butcher bird, lanius collurio. My neighbour, who shot it,
says that it might easily have escaped his notice, had not the outcries
and chattering of the white-throats and other small birds drawn his
attention to the bush where it was: its craw was filled with the legs
and wings of beetles.
The next rare birds (which were procured for me last week) were some
ring-ousels, turdi torquati.
This week twelve months a gentleman from London, being with us, was
amusing himself with a gun, and found, he told us, on an old yew hedge
where there were berries, some birds like blackbirds, with rings of
white round their necks: a neighbouring farmer also at the same time
observed the same; but, as no specimens were procured little notice was
taken. I mentioned this circumstance to you in my letter of November
the 4th, 1767 (you, however, paid but small regard to what I said, as I
had not seen these birds myself); but last week, the aforesaid farmer,
seeing a large flock, twenty or thirty of these birds, shot two cocks
and two hens: and says, on recollection, that he remembers to have
observed these birds again last spring, about Lady-day, as it were, on
their return to the north. Now perhaps these ousels are not the ousels
of the north of England, but belong to the more northern parts of
Europe; and may retire before the excessive rigour of the frosts in
those parts; and return to breed in the spring, when the cold abates.
If this be the case, here is discovered a new bird of winter passage,
concerning whose migrations the writers are silent: but if these birds
should prove the ousels of the north of England, then here is a
migration disclosed within our own kingdom never before remarked. It
does not yet appear whether they retire beyond the bounds of our island
to the south; but it is most probable that they usually do, or else one
cannot suppose that they would have continued so long unnoticed in the
southern counties. The ousel is larger than a blackbird, and feeds on
haws; but last autumn (when there were no haws) it fed on yew-berries:
in the spring it feeds on ivy-berries, which ripen only at that season,
in March and April.
I must not omit to tell you (as you have been so lately on the study of
reptiles) that my people, every now and then of late, draw up with a
bucket of water from my well, which is 63 feet deep, a large black
warty lizard with a fin-tail and yellow belly. How they first came down
at that depth, and how they were ever to have got out thence without
help, is more than I am able to say.
My thanks are due to you for your trouble and care in the examination
of a buck’s head. As far as your discoveries reach at present, they
seem much to corroborate my suspicions; and I hope Mr. … may find
reason to give his decision in my favour; and then, I think, we may
advance this extraordinary provision of nature as a new instance of the
wisdom of God in the creation.
As yet I have not quite done with my history of the oedicnemus, or
stone curlew; for I shall desire a gentleman in Sussex (near whose
house these birds congregate in vast flocks in the autumn) to observe
nicely when they leave him (if they do leave him), and when they return
again in the spring; I was with this gentleman lately, and saw several
single birds.
Letter XXI
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, Nov. 28, 1768.
Dear Sir,
With regard to the oedicnemus, or stone curlew, I intend to write very
soon to my friend near Chichester, in whose neighbourhood these birds
seem most to abound; and shall urge him to take particular notice when
they begin to congregate, and afterwards to watch them most narrowly
whether they do not withdraw themselves during the dead of the winter.
When I have obtained information with respect to this circumstance, I
shall have finished my history of the stone curlew; which I hope will
prove to your satisfaction, as it will be, I trust, very near the
truth. This gentleman, as he occupies a large farm of his own, and is
abroad early and late, will be a very proper spy upon the motions of
these birds: and besides, as I have prevailed on him to buy the
Naturalist’s Journal (with which he is much delighted), I shall expect
that he will be very exact in his dates. It is very extraordinary, as
you observe, that a bird so common with us should never straggle to
you.
And here will be the properest place to mention, while I think of it,
an anecdote which the above-mentioned gentleman told me when I was last
at his house; which was that, in a warren joining to his outlet, many
daws (corvi monedulae) build every year in the rabbit burrows under
ground. The way he and his brothers used to take their nests, while
they were boys, was by listening at the mouths of the holes; and, if
they heard the young ones cry, they twisted the nest out with a forked
stick. Some water-fowls (viz., the puffins) breed, I know, in that
manner; but I should never have suspected the daws of building in holes
on the flat ground.
Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place to breed
in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in the
interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that amazing
work of antiquity: which circumstance alone speaks the prodigious
height of the upright stones, that they should be tall enough to secure
those nests from the annoyance of shepherd-boys, who are always idling
round that place.
One of my neighbours last Saturday, November the 26th, saw a martin in
a sheltered bottom: the sun shone warm, and the bird was hawking
briskly after flies. I am now perfectly satisfied that they do not all
leave this island in the winter.
You judge very right, I think, in speaking with reserve and caution
concerning the cures done by toads: for, let people advance what they
will on such subjects, yet there is such a propensity in mankind
towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate any
thing from common report, especially in print, without expressing some
degree of doubt and suspicion.
Your approbation, with regard to my new discovery of the migration of
the ring-ousel, gives me satisfaction; and I find you concur with me in
suspecting that they are foreign birds which visit us. You will be
sure, I hope, not to omit to make inquiry whether your ring-ousels
leave your rocks in the autumn. What puzzles me most, is the very short
stay they make with us; for in about three weeks they are all gone. I
shall be very curious to remark whether they will call on us at their
return in the spring, as they did last year.
I want to be better informed with regard to ichthyology. If fortune had
settled me near the sea-side, or near some great river, my natural
propensity would soon have urged me to have made myself acquainted with
their productions: but as I have lived mostly in inland parts, and in
an upland district, my knowledge of fishes extends little farther than
to those common sorts which our brooks and lakes produce.
I am, etc.
Letter XXII
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, July 2, 1769.
Dear Sir,
As to the peculiarity of jackdaws building with us under the ground in
rabbit-burrows, you have, in part, hit upon the reason; for, in
reality, there are hardly any towers or steeples in all this country.
And perhaps, Norfolk excepted, Hampshire and Sussex are as meanly
furnished with churches as almost any counties in the kingdom. We have
many livings of two or three hundred pounds a year, whose houses of
worship make little better appearance than dovecots. When I first saw
Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, and the fens of
Lincolnshire, I was amazed at the number of spires which presented
themselves in every point of view. As an admirer of prospects, I have
reason to lament this want in my own country; for such objects are very
necessary ingredients in an elegant landscape.
What you mention with respect to reclaimed toads raises my curiosity.
An ancient author, though no naturalist, has well remarked that ‘Every
kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the
sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed, of mankind.’*
* James, chap. iii. 7.
It is a satisfaction to me to find that a green lizard has actually
been procured for you in Devonshire; because it corroborates my
discovery, which I made many years ago, of the same sort, on a sunny
sandbank near Farnham in Surrey. I am well acquainted with the south
hams of Devonshire; and can suppose that district, from its southerly
situation, to be a proper habitation for such animals in their best
colours.
Since the ring-ousels of your vast mountains do certainly not forsake
them against winter, our suspicions that those which visit this
neighbourhood about Michaelmas are not English birds, but driven from
the more northern parts of Europe by the frosts, are still more
reasonable: and it will be worth your pains to endeavour to trace from
whence they come, and to inquire why they make so very short a stay.
In your account of your error with regard to the two species of herons,
you incidentally gave me great entertainment in your description of the
heronry at Cressi-hall; which is a curiosity I could never manage to
see. Fourscore nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I
would ride half as many miles to have a sight of. Pray be sure to tell
me in your next whose seat Cressi-hall is, and near what town it lies.*
I have often thought that those vast extents of fens have never been
sufficiently explored. If half a dozen gentlemen, furnished with a good
strength of water-spaniels, were to beat them over for a week, they
would certainly find more species.
* Cressi-hall is near Spalding, in Lincolnshire.
There is no bird, I believe, whose manners I have studied more than
that of the caplimulgus (the goat-sucker), as it is a wonderful and
curious creature: but I have always found that though sometimes it may
chatter as it flies, as I know it does, yet in general it utters its
jarring note sitting on a bough; and I have for many an half hour
watched it as it sat with its under mandible quivering, and
particularly this summer. It perches usually on a bare twig, with its
head lower than its tail, in an attitude well expressed by your
draughtsman in the folio British Zoology. This bird is most punctual in
beginning its song exactly at the close of day; so exactly that I have
known it strike up more than once or twice just at the report of the
Portsmouth evening gun, which we can hear when the weather is still. It
appears to me past all doubt that its notes are formed by organic
impulse, by the powers of the parts of its windpipe, formed for sound,
just as cats pur. You will credit me, I hope, when I tell you that, as
my neighbours were assembled in an hermitage on the side of a steep
hill where we drink tea, one of these churn-owls came and settled on
the cross of that little straw edifice and began to chatter, and
continued his note for many minutes: and we were all struck with wonder
to find that the organs of that little animal, when put in motion, gave
a sensible vibration to the whole building! This bird also sometimes
makes a small squeak, repeated four or five times; and I have observed
that to happen when the cock has been pursuing the hen in a toying way
through the boughs of a tree.
It would not be at all strange if your bat, which you have procured,
should prove a new one, since five species have been found in a
neighbouring kingdom. The great sort that I mentioned is certainly a
nondescript: I saw but one this summer, and that I had no opportunity
of taking.
Your account of the Indian-grass was entertaining. I am no angler
myself; but inquiring of those that are, what they supposed that part
of their tackle to be made of? they replied ‘of the intestines of a
silkworm.’
Though I must not pretend to great skill in entomology, yet I cannot
say that I am ignorant of that kind of knowledge: I may now and then,
perhaps, be able to furnish you with a little information.
The vast rains ceased with us much about the same time as with you, and
since we have had delicate weather. Mr. Barker, who has measured the
rain for more than thirty years, says, in a late letter, that more has
fallen this year than in any he ever attended to; though, from July
1763 to January 1764, more fell than in any seven months of this year.
Letter XXIII
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, February 28, 1769.
Dear Sir,
It is not improbable that the Guernsey lizard and our green lizard may
be specifically the same; all that I know is, that, when some years ago
many Guernsey lizards were turned loose in Pembroke college garden, in
the University of Oxford, they lived a great while, and seemed to enjoy
themselves very well, but never bred. Whether this circumstance will
prove anything either way I shall not pretend to say.
I return you thanks for your account of Cressi-hall; but recollect, not
without regret, that in June 1746 I was visiting for a week together at
Spalding, without ever being told that such a curiosity was just at
hand. Pray send me word in your next what sort of tree it is that
contains such a quantity of herons’ nests; and whether the heronry
consists of a whole grove or wood, or only of a few trees.
It gave me satisfaction to find that we accorded so well about the
caprimulgus: all I contended for was to prove that it often chatters
sitting as well as flying; and therefore the noise was voluntary, and
from organic impulse, and not from the resistance of the air against
the hollow of its mouth and throat.
If ever I saw anything like actual migration, it was last
Michaelmas-day. I was travelling, and out early in the morning: at
first there was a vast fog; but, by the time that I was got seven or
eight miles from home towards the coast, the sun broke out into a
delicate warm day. We were then on a large heath or common, and I could
discern, as the mist began to break away, great numbers of swallows
(hirundines rusticae) clustering on the stinted shrubs and bushes, as
if they had roosted there all night. As soon as the air became clear
and pleasant they all were on the wing at once; and, by a placid and
easy flight, proceeded on southward towards the sea: after this I did
not see any more flocks, only now and then a straggler.
I cannot agree with those persons that assert that the swallow kind
disappear some and some gradually, as they come, for the bulk of them
seem to withdraw at once: only some stragglers stay behind a long
while, and do never, there is the greatest reason to believe, leave
this island. Swallows seem to lay themselves up, and to come forth in a
warm day, as bats do continually of a warm evening, after they have
disappeared for weeks. For a very respectable gentleman assured me
that, as he was walking with some friends under Merton-wall on a
remarkably hot noon, either in the last week in December or the first
week in January, he espied three or four swallows huddled together on
the moulding of one of the windows of that college. I have frequently
remarked that swallows are seen later at Oxford than elsewhere: is it
owing to the vast massy buildings of that place, to the many waters
round it, or to what else?
When I used to rise in a morning last autumn, and see the swallows and
martins clustering on the chimneys and thatch of the neighbouring
cottages, I could not help being touched with a secret delight, mixed
with some degree of mortification: with delight to observe with how
much ardour and punctuality those poor little birds obeyed the strong
impulse towards migration, or hiding, imprinted on their minds by their
great Creator; and with some degree of mortification, when I reflected
that, after all our pains and inquiries, we are yet not quite certain
to what regions they do migrate; and are still farther embarrassed to
find that some do not actually migrate at all.
These reflections made so strong an impression on my imagination, that
they became productive of a composition that may perhaps amuse you for
a quarter of an hour when next I have the honour of writing to you.
Letter XXIV
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, May 29, 1769.
Dear Sir,
The scarabaeus fullo I know very well, having seen it in collections;
but have never been able to discover one wild in its natural state. Mr.
Banks told me he thought it might be found on the sea-coast.
On the thirteenth of April I went to the sheep-down, where the
ring-ousels have been observed to make their appearance at spring and
fall, in their way perhaps to the north or south; and was much pleased
to see three birds about the usual spot. We shot a cock and a hen; they
were plump and in high condition. The hen had but very small rudiments
of eggs within her, which proves they are late breeders; whereas those
species of the thrush kind that remain with us the whole year have
fledged young before that time. In their crops was nothing very
distinguishable, but somewhat that seemed like blades of vegetables
nearly digested. In autumn they feed on haws and yew-berries, and in
the spring on ivy-berries. I dressed one of these birds, and found it
juicy and well-flavoured. It is remarkable that they make but a few
days’ stay in their spring visit, but rest near a fortnight at
Michaelmas. These birds, from the observations of three springs and two
autumns, are most punctual in their return; and exhibit a new migration
unnoticed by the writers, who supposed they never were to be seen in
any of the southern counties.
One of my neighbours lately brought me a new salicaria, which at first
I suspected might have proved your willow-lark,* but, on a nicer
examination, it answered much better to the description of that species
which you shot at Revesby, in Lincolnshire. My bird I describe thus:
‘It is a size less than the grasshopper-lark; the head, back, and
coverts of the wings of a dusky brown, without those dark spots of the
grasshopper-lark; over each eye is a milk-white stroke; the chin and
throat are white, and the under parts of a yellowish white; the rump is
tawny and the feathers of the tail sharp-pointed; the bill is dusky and
sharp, and the legs are dusky; the hinder claw long and crooked. The
person that shot it says that it sung so like a reed-sparrow that he
took it for one; and that it sings all night; but this account merits
further inquiry. For my part, I suspect it is a second sort of
locustella, hinted at by Dr. Derham in Ray’s Letters: see p. 108. He
also procured me a grasshopper-lark.
* For this salicaria see letter August 30, 1769.