e. And we
know that grooms, and gentlemen of the turf, think large nostrils
necessary, and a perfection, in hunters and running horses.

Oppian, the Greek poet, by the following line, seems to have had some
notion that stags have four spiracula:

"[Greek text]."

"Quadrifidae nares, quadruplices ad respirationem canales."

OPP. CYN. Lib. ii. 1. 181.

Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say that goats breathe
at their ears; whereas he asserts just the contrary: "[Greek text]."
"Alcmaeon does not advance what is true, when he avers that goats breathe
through their ears."--"History of Animals." Book I., chap xi.

LETTER XV.

SELBORNE, _March 30th_, 1768.

Dear Sir,--Some intelligent country people have a notion that we have in
these parts a species of the _genus mustelinum_, besides the weasel,
stoat, ferret, and polecat; a little reddish beast, not much bigger than
a field-mouse, but much longer, which they call a _cane_. This piece of
intelligence can be little depended on; but farther inquiry may be made.

A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milk-white rooks in one nest.
A booby of a carter, finding them before they were able to fly, threw
them down and destroyed them, to the regret of the owner, who would have
been glad to have preserved such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw the
birds myself nailed against the end of a barn, and was surprised to find
that their bills, legs, feet, and claws were milk-white.

A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down above my house
this winter: were not these the _Emberiza nivalis_, the snow-flake of the
Brit. Zool.? No doubt they were.

A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught
in the fields after it was come to its full colours. In about a year it
began to look dingy; and, blackening every succeeding year, it became
coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hempseed. Such
influence has food on the colour of animals! The pied and mottled
colours of domesticated animals are supposed to be owing to high,
various, and unusual food.

I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo-pint (_arum_) was
frequently scratched out of the dry banks of hedges, and eaten in severe
snowy weather. After observing, with some exactness, myself, and getting
others to do the same, we found it was the