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and especially in snowy weather, but also at the close of the evening, by men who lay in ambush among the woods and groves to kill them as they came in to roost'. These are the principal circumstances relating to this wonderful internal migration, which with us takes place towards the end of November, and ceases early in the spring. Last winter we had, in Selborne high wood, about a hundred of these doves; but in former times the flocks were so vast, not only with us but all the district round, that on mornings and evenings they traversed the air, like rooks, in strings, reaching for a mile together. When they thus rendezvoused here by thousands, if they happened to be suddenly roused from their roost trees on an evening,

"Their rising all at once was like the sound

Of thunder heard remote."

It will by no means be foreign to the present purpose to add, that I had a relation in this neighbourhood who made it a practice, for a time, whenever he could procure the eggs of a ring-dove, to place them under a pair of doves that were sitting in his own pigeon-house; hoping thereby, if he could bring about a coalition, to enlarge his breed, and teach his own doves to beat out into the woods and to support themselves by mast: the plan was plausible, but something always interrupted the success; for though the birds were usually hatched, and sometimes grew to half their size, yet none ever arrived at maturity. I myself have seen these foundlings in their nest displaying a strange ferocity of nature, so as scarcely to bear to be looked at, and snapping with their bills by way of menace. In short, they always died, perhaps for want of proper sustenance: but the owner thought that by their fierce and wild demeanor they frighted their foster-mothers, and so were starved.

4 Some old sportsmen say that the main part of these flocks used to withdraw as soon as the heavy Christmas frosts were over.

Virgil, as a familiar occurrence, by way of simile, describes a dove haunting the cavern of a rock, in such engaging numbers, that I cannot refrain from quoting the passage: and John Dryden has rendered it so happily in our language, that without further excuse I shall add his translation also.

"Qualis speluncâ subitò commota Columba,

Cui domus et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi,
Fertur in arva volans, plausumque exterrita pennis
Dat tecto ingentem-mox aëre lapsa quieto,
Radit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alas."

"As when a dove her rocky hold forsakes,

Roused, in a fright her sounding wings she shakes;
The cavern rings with clattering :-out she flies,
And leaves her callow care, and cleaves the skies:
At first she flutters :-but at length she springs
To smoother flight, and shoots upon her wings."

I am, &c.

LETTER I.

TO THE HONOURABLE DAINES BARRINGTON1.

DEAR SIR,

SELBORNE, June 30, 1769.

WHEN I was in town last month I partly engaged that I would some time do myself the honour to write to you on the subject of natural history and I am the more ready to fulfil my promise, because I see you are a gentleman of great candour, and one that will make allowances; especially where the writer professes to be an outdoor naturalist, one that takes his observations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others.

The following is a list of summer birds of passage which I have discovered in this neighbourhood, ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear:

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'Daines Barrington, honourable by birth and respected for his talents, was well suited by the pursuits to which from choice he had devoted himself, to become the favourite correspondent of an observer like Gilbert White. The legal studies which he had originally cultivated as a professional duty, and in which he had been so successful as to have merited the office of recorder of Bristol, and to have become subsequently a Welsh

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judge, were eventually laid aside by him: although not until after they had fostered in him an attachment to antiquarian pursuits which he retained through life so strongly as to entitle him to be distinguished among his fellow students in that department of knowledge as a vice president of the Antiquarian Society. To the transactions of that body he was a frequent contributor. He also made numerous communications to the Royal Society, which were printed in the Philosophical Transactions. Many of them were afterwards republished by himself in a separate form, under the title of Miscellanies; a work alluded to with satisfaction by our historian in his Letter LI. In his essays Barrington availed himself freely of the information imparted to him by White, whose authority he repeatedly quotes, and whose merits as a "well read, ingenious, and observant" naturalist he is ever ready to acknowledge.

A large proportion of the essays in the Miscellanies are on subjects of natural history; and in many of them Daines Barrington was the advo. cate of views directly opposed to those of our author's other correspondent, Pennant. Thus, for instance, while Pennant felt a full conviction as to the migration of many birds, Barrington was most sceptical on the subject; and it is scarcely to be doubted that his letters to Gilbert White tended to keep alive and to increase the suspicions which the historian of Selborne always entertained that the little creatures whose presence delighted him during the summer, were still at hand, though hidden from him, in the winter. Another point on which his two correspondents disagreed was as to the authority which they attributed to Ray and to Linnæus; and White was evidently quite aware of the difference of their feelings on this subject, and humoured them so far as to accommodate himself to the wishes of each when addressing him in particular. When sending to Pennant, in his Letter XVI, a list of the summer birds of passage, the Latin names which he uses are "Linnæi nomina:" in his correspondence with Barrington, in this Letter I. and elsewhere, he designates his birds, scientifically, by "Raii Nomina." Barrington argued so warmly against the deficiencies of the Linnæan characters, and advocated so strongly the excellencies of our countryman John Ray, that he is carried on by the discussion in which he was engaged to inquire, no doubt in his estimation triumphantly, "After this comparison can there be a doubt whether the English botanist should consult Ray or Linnæus for an English plant?"-E. T. B.

14. Grasshopper lark,

15. Swift,

Alauda minima lo- Middle of April: a small sibilous note, till the end of July. About April 27.

custæ voce:

Hirundo apus:

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This assemblage of curious and amusing birds belongs to ten several genera of the Linnæan system: and are all of the Ordo of Passeres, save the Jynx and Cuculus, which are Pica, and the Charadrius (Edicnemus) and Rallus (Ortygometra), which are Gralla.

These birds, as they stand numerically, belong to the following Linnæan genera:

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Most soft-billed birds live on insects, and not on grain and seeds; and therefore at the end of summer they retire but the following soft-billed birds, though insect-eaters, stay with us the year round:

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