16 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.
about an hour. All of a sudden they rise in an immense flock, and
stream away north-eastward up the Broad Street Green road, indulg-
ing in all sorts of antics in their flight, rising and falling, wheeling
about and apparently almost turning somersaults in flocks; they
mostly settle again for another "talkee-talkee "in South Wood or Bog
Grove, but finally drop quietly down to roost in Spickett's Grove,
Great Totham. Exactly the same thing reversed happens again in
the morning. These movements are as regular and certain as pos-
sible, but where is the guiding principle ? Here we certainly have a
local diurnal migration on a small scale, with temperature and food,
breeding and moulting left out of the calculations. Dear old Gil-
bert White wrote, over a hundred years ago, "There are doubtless
many home internal migrations within this kingdom that want to be
better understood."27
To supply a satisfactory answer to the questions raised may be
too much to ask of our members, but I trust some will give them
their attention. I will conclude with an extract from Prof. Newton's
article, "Birds," in the new edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica." Here we read :—
" But returning to the subject of migration proper, distinguished
as it ought to be from that of the more or less accidental occurrence
of stray visitors from afar, we have here more than enough to excite
our wonder, and indeed are brought face to face with perhaps the
greatest mystery which the whole animal kingdom presents—a mys-
tery which attracted the attention of the earliest writers, and can in its
chief point be no more explained by the modern man of science than
by the simple-minded savage or the poet or prophet of antiquity."28
27 Letter viii. to Daines Barrington. Bell ed. vol. i. p. 132.
28 This last reference to Jeremiah viii. 7, "Yea, the Stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed
times ; and the Turtle and the Crane and the Swallow observe the times of their coming,"
Little Gull on the Thames near Tilbury and at Harwich.—Mr. Harting
writes as follows to the ,; Zoologist "for January, 1890 :—" Mr. Cooper, of Radnor
Street, kindly showed me, while still unskinned, a nice specimen of the Little
Gull (Larus minutus), which his son had shot the previous day (Oct. 26th) from
the Essex shore below Tilbury, at a spot know as Mucking Bight. It was a bird
of the year, with the barred shoulders peculiar to its age in the Little Gull, and
even more conspicuous in the Kittiwake (L. tridactylus). The legs and feet were
of a dull flesh-colour, as in Larus marinus and L. argentatus." And in the same
number, Mr. F. Kerry records the shooting of an immature female specimen of
L. minutus in the harbour at Harwich, on December 4th, 1889.