cies--notably those two glorious
songsters, the Orphean Warbler and Hippolais, which delight our ears
everywhere on the other side of the Channel--follow our nightingales,
blackcaps, and warblers northward every spring almost to the Straits of
Dover: but dare not cross, simply because they have been, as it were,
created since the gulf was opened, and have never learnt from their
parents how to fly over it.

In the case of fishes, again, I might say much on the curious fact that
the Cyprinidae, or white fish--carp, &c.--and their natural enemy, the
pike, are indigenous, I believe, only to the rivers, English or
continental, on the eastern side of the Straits of Dover; while the
rivers on the western side were originally tenanted, like our Hampshire
streams, as now, almost entirely by trout, their only Cyprinoid being the
minnow--if it, too, be not an interloper; and I might ask you to consider
the bearing of this curious fact on the former junction of England and
France.

But I have only time to point out to you a few curious facts with regard
to reptiles, which should be specially interesting to a Hampshire bio-
geologist. You know, of course, that in Ireland there are no reptiles,
save the little common lizard, _Lacerta agilis_, and a few frogs on the
mountain-tops--how they got there I cannot conceive. And you will, of
course, guess, and rightly, that the reason of the absence of reptiles
is: that Ireland was parted off from England before the creatures, which
certainly spread from southern and warmer climates, had time to get
there. You know, of course, that we have a few reptiles in England. But
you may not be aware that, as soon as you cross the Channel, you find
many more species of reptiles than here, as well as those which you find
here. The magnificent green lizard which rattles about like a rabbit in
a French forest, is never found here; simply because it had not worked
northward till after the Channel was formed. But there are three
reptiles peculiar to this part of England which should be most
interesting to a Hampshire zoologist. The one is the sand lizard (_L.
stirpium_), found on Bourne-heath, and, I suspect, in the South Hampshire
moors likewise--a North European and French species. Another, the
_Coronella laevis_, a harmless French and Austrian snake, which has been
found about me, in North Hants and South Berks, now about fifteen or
twenty times. I have had three specimens from my own parish.