When we meet I shall be glad to have some conversation with you concerning the proposal you make of my drawing up an account of the animals in this neighbourhood. Your partiality towards my small abilities persuades you, I fear, that I am able to do more than is in my power: for it is no small
undertaking for a man unsupported and alone to begin a natural history from his own autopsia! Though there is endless room for observation in the field of nature, which is boundless, yet investigation (where a man endeavours to be sure of his facts) can make but slow progress; and all that one could collect in many years would go into a very narrow compass.
Some extracts from your ingenious “Investigations of the Difference between the Present Temperature of the Air in Italy,” etc., have fallen in my way, and gave me great satisfaction: they have removed the objections that always arose in my mind whenever I came to the passages which you quote. Surely the judicious Virgil, when writing a didactic poem for the region of Italy, could never think of describing freezing rivers, unless such severity of weather pretty frequently occurred!
P.S.—Swallows appear amidst snows and frost.
LETTER VI.
Selborne, May 21st, 1770.
Dear Sir,—The severity and turbulence of last month so interrupted the regular process of summer migration, that some of the birds do but just begin to
show themselves, and others are apparently thinner than usual; as the white-throat, the black-cap, the red-start, the fly-catcher. I well remember that after the very severe spring in the year 1739-40, summer birds of passage were very scarce. They come probably hither with a south-east wind, or when it blows between those points: but in that unfavourable year the winds blowed the whole spring and summer through from the opposite quarters. And yet amidst all these disadvantages two swallows, as I mentioned in my last, appeared this year as early as the 11th April amidst frost and snow; but they withdrew again for a time.
I am not pleased to find that some people seem so little satisfied with Scopoli’s new publication; there is room to expect great things from the hands of that man, who is a good naturalist: and one would think that a history of the birds of so distant and southern a region as Carniola would be new and interesting. I could wish to see that work, and hope to get it sent down. Dr. Scopoli is physician to the wretches that work in the quicksilver mines of that district.
When you talked of keeping a reed-sparrow, and giving it seeds, I could not help wondering; because the reed-sparrow which I mentioned to you (Passer arundinaceus minor Raii) is a soft-billed bird; and most probably migrates hence before winter; whereas