birds of the same division. Linnaeus might with great propriety
have put it into his genus of motacilla; and the motacilla salicaria
of his Fauna Suecica seems to come the nearest to it. It is no
uncommon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there
is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in
some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and day
during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a
swallow, a sky-lark; and has a strange hurrying manner in its song.
My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your
fen salicaria, shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent
characteristic of it when he says, 'Rostrum & pedes in hac avicula
multo majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione.' See letter May 29,
1769.

I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stone curlew, which
was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground: There were two;
but the fender inadvertently crushed one with his foot before he
saw them.

When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had not forgot to
mention the faculty that snakes have of stinking se defendendo. I
knew a gentleman who kept a tame snake, which was in its person
as sweet as any animal while in a good humour and unalarmed; but
as soon as a stranger or a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and
filled the room with such nauseous effluvia as rendered it hardly
supportable. Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Ray's Synop. Ouadr. is
an innocuous and sweet animal; but, when pressed hard by dogs
and men, it can eject such a pestilent and fetid smell and
excrement, that nodding can be more horrible.