)
(******* See the story of Hero and Leander.)
Letter XXV
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, Aug. 30, 1769.
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.
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