stance of his nocturnal song; for surely there is not the smallest resemblance in the melody, though very sweet.

'The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark,
When neither is attended; and, I think,
The nightingale, when he doth sing by day,
While every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.

How many things by season season'd are,

To their right praise and true perfection!'

Nay, I have even known the ignorant and inorganised aver the hurried and huddled notes of the eternally restless sedgebird [Currùca salicària Fleming], to be those of the nightingale! I cannot be mistaken, having so constantly heard the nightingales in Bagley Wood, near Oxford; and, once heard by a duller ear than mine, they and their notes are not likely to be forgotten. They seem to love low meadows and bushy grounds. I stopped a full half hour last night in the road, during which he scarcely ceased singing; from the low and quickly repeated gurgling note, to his full flow and rich gushes of lofty melody; with short but lovely pauses, doubling the effect of the resumed and reiterated strains. It was a moonless night, but refreshingly mild, and fragrant with the odours of woodbines and hedge-flowers, while the glowworm shone sweetly on the bank."

Much, however, as I lament that the visits of this bird are so few and far between, I would not give up the blackcap for him; of all our English warblers, to my taste, the most ravishingly sweet, wild, and wonderful. As the Scotch say to the Irish, when the latter pretend a claim to Ossian, "Well, take him if ye can we have Robert Burns for our own! So I say of my beloved blackcap: he is the Burns of birds. And really often, Sir, when musing alone (though I may be laughed at for telling it, and I care not), delightfully startled at his sudden burst of ecstatic song, I exclaim aloud, “God bless thy merry heart!" and I find I have long ago written opposite him, on the margin of my Ray, "Avium poeta, et omni modulamine amplissimus.” *

The finely tuned ear of our darling White duly felt the music of this bird, when he gives it the numerous and just epithets of " a full, sweet, deep, loud, and wild pipe." He has not only, too, a perfectly original style of his own, though, like a poet of all-genius, he sometimes hardly knows what he is about, and has (regardless of Aristotle and the unities) neither beginning, middle, nor end; but is an eminent and most successful imitator of many other birds, particularly of

"Poet of birds, and fullest of all song."

the thrush and swallow, even to deception, if not seen; and, like the mightiest of bards, will, from his highest flights, suddenly break off into his chat, chat, chat, of homeliest prose.

I find, in my notes of 1819, that very early, one April morning, in bed, with the sash open (for I frequently, on fine nights, place an Eolian harp in my chamber window), I imagined I heard a nightingale in full song. I rushed out half-dressed and slipshod to the thicket, where the fine strains still flowed by fits, and distinctly saw it was my friend the blackcap; which, had I not seen, I should have believed to have been a nightingale, so full, thick, rich, and loud were the many modulated notes. They were not repeated the next morning. Might not this blackcap, in his passage through the south of England, resting in the night, have heard a nightingale, and retained in his memory parts of the song?

The good and honest old Izaak Walton, with the finest spirit of that faith he sincerely believed and felt, thus honours the nightingale :-"But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, Lord, what music hast thou provided for thy saints in heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music on earth?"" The Latin scholar of taste may be highly gratified with a masterly description of the nightingale's song, on referring to the Natural History of Pliny, book x. chap. 29., which I will not expose my pedantry by quoting, nor my clumsiness by attempting to translate. It begins about the middle of the chapter, " Lusciniis diebus ac noctibus continuis . . . . . densante se frondium germine," &c. &c., and is a rich masterpiece of brilliant composition.

Mind, I am not writing a history of these birds, or I should never know where to end; but merely a chit chat sketchy scrap, for the lighter readers of the Magazine, who prefer the poetry of natural history to the dry and draffy multiplication-table nomenclature of technicalities, and the concatenated articulations of inductiveness. I leave these to the learned. I never loved to deal in the nuga difficiles, [puzzling trifles], though, I fear me, like poor Dogberry, I am sometimes guilty of "letting my reading and writing appear, when there is no need of such vanity." I had lately an inkling to have offered you some remarks on many of our warblers' melodies, and the language of birds, both their

poetry and prose: but it has been so ably and admirably commenced by a gentleman [Mr. Main] so very far more competent (Vol. IV. p. 118. and 412.), that I will not even presume to play a second; but leave him with a Tasto solo, ad libitum; praying him to proceed as he has begun; most honestly confessing my far greater pleasure in enjoying his acute and well-defined notes, than seeing in print my own inferior accompaniments.

May 1. 1832.

Westfelton, near Shrewsbury.

JOHN F. M. DOVASTON.

ART. VI. Illustrations in British Zoology. By GEORGE JOHNSTON, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

4. E'OLIS RUFIBRANCHIA LIS. (fig. 85.)

Cl. Gasterópoda, Ord. Nudibranchia, Fam. Glaúcidæ, Gen. E`olis.

85

THE genus E'olis, Eólida, or Eolídia, (for thus variously is it written,) was established by Cuvier, when this great master in natural science first undertook to give to molluscous animals an arrangement, in which the various families should stand according to their relations, as indicated by their structure and habits, and which, in its practical application, has as much facility as the most incongruous methods of any of his predecessors. The genus embraces such naked sea-snails as have two or three pairs of conical non-retractile tentacula at the head; and external branchiæ, in the form of tapered slightly compressed filaments or papillæ, disposed in one or more rows along the back. The skin covers the body closely, and nowhere assumes the form of a cloak; and the little creatures move along solely by the undulations of the foot, which, like that of the slug, forms the entire under surface.

In illustration of the genus, I select a species which, it appears to me, has not hitherto been described, and which may be distinguished by the following character:

E. rufibranchialis. - Corpore limaciformi, albido; filamentis branchialibus numerosis, longis, coccineis, apice albis; tentaculis quatuor.

E. rufibranchialis. - Body snail-like, whitish; branchial filaments numerous, long, scarlet, tipped with white; tentacula four.

This new Eolis was found creeping on some corallines dredged up in Berwick Bay. The body, when fully extended, is half an inch long, whitish, somewhat transparent, soft, oblong, tapered behind; branchial filaments slightly tapered, disposed in two interrupted rows along the margins of the back; sides white, smooth; foot narrow, white; tentacula white, conical, the superior rather shorter and wrinkled, the inferior more slender and smooth; eyes two, extremely minute, placed at the base of the superior tentacula. The branchial filaments are unequal in length; they are carried erect when the animal creeps in the water, but fall down on its sides when removed from it. Each filament consists of a red central part, which is enveloped in a transparent soft skin or coat; and the white tips appear as if they were perforated.

Our figure exhibits the animal considerably magnified; for in such minute creatures as these are, figures of the natural size are of no utility.

Berwick upon Tweed, March 18. 1832.

CORRECTION to the Name of the Species of Planària described p. 344-346. The recovery of a long lost notebook has enabled me to ascertain that the subject of my last illustration is the Planària vittàta of Mr. Montagu (Lin, Trans., vol. xi. p. 25. tab. 5. fig. 3.). The differences which may be remarked in our descriptions proceed evidently from their being taken from the animals when in different states of repletion. Montagu, therefore, is the discoverer of this species in Britain. His specimens were found on the coast of Devonshire; and Dr. Fleming has also seen it in the north of Scotland.

ART. VII. On the Varieties of Pàris quadrifòlia, considered with respect to the ordinary Characteristics of Monocotyledonous Plants. By the Rev. J. S. HENSLOW, A.M., King's Professor of Botany in the University of Cambridge.

THE flowering stems of Pàris quadrifòlia (fig. 86. a) bear one whorl of leaves, and four whorls in the floral organs; and in the most common state of the plant these whorls are respectively composed of four leaves, four sepals, four petals,

eight stamens, and a four-celled pistil, crowned by four stigmas. In this state, therefore, it offers a marked exception to the law which is so prevalent among monocotyledons, "that the number 3, or a multiple of it, should prevail in the developement of some part or other of their structure."

The frequency, however, with which this plant deviates from its more common condition, seems to indicate a great degree of instability in the operation of whatever be the law which regulates the developement of its subordinate parts; which should make us cautious in pronouncing upon the normal condition of its several foliaceous whorls. It seems to me that some light may be thrown upon this question by examining a great number of specimens from different localities, and recording the limits within which the number of parts in each organ is found to vary. With this view, I have, for the last three or four years, noted the different varieties gathered by myself and two friends, Messrs. Babington and Downes, in a habitat near Cambridge. The result of our examinations, made upon 1500 specimens, I have arranged in the following tables, upon which I shall offer a few remarks.