low 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 œdicnemus, 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 T. PENNANT, Esq.

DEAR SIR,

Selborne, Nov. 28, 1768.

WITH regard to the cdicnemus, 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

The warty newt (triton palustris).—ED,

to his outlet, many daws (corvi monedula) build every year in the rabbit-burrows under ground. The way he and his brother 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 nests 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 enquiry 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 icthyology. 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 further than to those common sorts which our brooks and lakes produce. I am, &c.

LETTER XXII. To T. PENNANT, Esq.

DEAR SIR,

Selborne, Jan. 2, 1769.

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 things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed, of mankind."*

It is a satisfaction to me to find that a green lizard has actually

There have been many instances related of tamed toads, some of which have been known to attain a considerable age. One is mentioned by Mr. Arscott which lived upwards of thirty-five years. The most curious fact, however, connected with the history of this animal, is its apa

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 bility of enduring for apparently almost indefinite periods enclosed within a mass of stone or of grow ing timber, various instances of which-many resting on most respectable authority-must have occurred within the reading of almost every person. Of course numerous experiments have been instituted in order to throw light upon so strange a phenomenon, from which, however, little can be satisfactorily deduced, save that at least in ordinary cases the ingress of some air is necessary, or the creature very shortly ceases to exist. Mr. Jesse informs us that he knew a gentleman who put a toad into a small flower-pot, and secured it so that no insect could penetrate it (which latter is, however, in all probability a mistake), and then buried it so deep in his gaden that it was secured from the influence of frost. At the end of twenty years he took it up, aid found the toad increased in bulk, and healthy. It has generally happened that, on the creature being restored to air and light, after having been so long immured, its death has followed almost immediately, probably in consequence of its too sudden liberation, an opinion which is strengthened by the following very credible narration, the accuracy of which I see no reason to question, and which was furnished me incidentally by an intelligent quarryman, of whom I was seeking some information with regard to fossils. A toad, that had been extricated unhurt from the interior of a block of limestone, was, he informed me, kept by his fellow workmen as a curiosity, and placed under a tumbler glass, where it lived about three weeks, at the expiration of which time it managed to effect its escape, thus showing that, when not too suddenly exposed to the free air, the animal will survive its release. I am inclined to imagine, also, that the wellknown experiments of Dr. Buckland on this subject would have been more satisfactory, had the creatures been gradually inured to close imprisonment. In ordinary cases it is probably a long time before the entrance of the cavity into which a toad had crept becomes completely closed, under which circumstances it may be, as indeed Dr. Buckland suggests, that, "deprived of food and air, it might fall into that state of torpor or suspended animation to which certain animals are subject in winter, but bow long it might continue in that state is uncertain." I do not remember to have heard of any but living toads being found immured. This animal can, indeed, insinuate itself into so small au orifice as to astonish any person who has not witnessed it; and in retreats into which it can but just squeeze itself it very commonly retires to pass the winter. Thus it is that it not unfrequently contrives to locate itself in cavities whence it finds itself unable to emerge, stalactitic incrustations or fortuitous accumulations opposing its re-passage from the interior of a rock, while the latter, or the growth of wood around the entrance, encloses it within the hollow of a tree. In either situation it would subsist for a time on the insects which continually crawl into such places, while its constitution would perhaps be gradually preparing to fall into that lethargic state above adverted to.

It must not be concealed, however, that this is merely a hypothetical supposition, though it would seem to be the most rational mode of accounting for the phenomenon. I am not aware that the animal has ever been found in other than a wakeful state.

The same sluggish tenaciousness of life appears to be evinced also by certain other species of amphibia, though probably not quite to the same extent. Capt. Brown relates of the triton palustris, an animal which in its general aspect seems to hold much the same relation to the smoothskinned newts which the toads do to the frogs, and which, perhaps, ought to constitute a distinct minimuin division, that he "once found a very large specimen of it in an old wooden conduit at Fountain-bridge, Edinburgh, which had been stopped at both ends for upwards of twenty years. The animal must have been at least that age, as it was not possible that it coula obtain access from the time the conduit was stopped."-ED.

to endeavour to trace from whence they come, and to enquire 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 never could 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 ove: for a week, they would certainly find more species.

Motheater.

There is no bird, I believe, whose manners I have studied more than that of the caprimulgus (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 a 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

* Cressi-hall is near Spalding, in Lincolnshire.

† A better name is motheater (phalanivora europaa), the whole structure of the birds of this genus being especially adapted for preying on nocturnal insects.-En.

I remember once hearing it, however, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, during bright sunshine, but such an occurrence is very unusual. Perhaps it may be as well to remark here, in reference to an erroneous statement in Capt. Brown's edition of this work, that our bird is by no means identical with the whip-poor-will motheater of America (phalanivora vocifera), a specics peculiar to that continent, and common in summer in many parts of the United States, where it literally makes the woods resound at night with its perpetual repetition of the note from which it has been named, pronounced in a very clear and distinct manner, the chief stress being laid on the first and last syllables. Our bird has ouly the notes above mentioned by Mr. White-the loud spinning-wheel burr, and an occasional faint squeak, which latter is on.y uttered on the wing.-ED.