Dear Sir,

It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of the ousel
migration pleases you. You put a very shrewd question when you
ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is southward?
Was not candour and openness the very life of natural history, I
should pass over this query just as the sly commentator does over a
crabbed passage in a classic; but common ingenuousness obliges
me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that I only
reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other autumnal birds
migrate from the northward to us, to partake of our milder winters,
and return to the northward again when the rigorous cold abates, so
I concluded that the ring-ousels did the same, as well as their
congeners the fieldfares; and especially as ring-ousels are known to
haunt cold mountainous countries: but I have good reason to
suspect since that they may come to us from westward; because I
hear, from very good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor; and
that they forsake that wild district about the time that our visitors
appear, and do not return till late in the spring.

I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and mine,
with a white stroke over its eye, and a tawny rump. I have surveyed
it alive and dead, and have procured several specimens; and am
perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will soon be convinced
of the same) that it is no more nor less than the passer
arundinaceus minor of Ray. This bird, by some means or other,
seems to be entirely omitted in the British Zoology; and one reason
probably was because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who ranges
it among his picis affines. It ought no doubt to have gone among
his aviculae cauda unicolore, and among your slender-billed small