The Sora Rail, _Rallus Carolinus_, which is more especially the subject of this paper, is somewhat inferior in size to the last species, and is easily distinguished from it by the small, round head, and short bill, in which it differs from all the rest of its family. This bill is scarcely half an inch in length, unusually broad at the base, and tapering regularly to a bluntly rounded point. At the base and through nearly the whole length of the lower mandible it is pale greenish-yellow, horn-colored at the tip. The crown of the head, nape, and shoulders, are of a uniform pale olive-brown, with a medial black stripe on the crown. The cheeks, throat, and breast, pale rufous brown, fading into rufous white on the belly, which is mottled with broad transverse gray lines. The back, scapulars, wing-coverts, and rump, are olive-brown, broadly patched with black, and having many of the feathers margined longitudinally with white, the quills dark blackish-brown, the tail dark reddish-brown. The lower parts from the tail posteriorily to the vent transversely banded with black and white. The legs long and slender, bare a short way up the tibia, of a pale greenish hue. The iris of the eye is bright chestnut. The male bird has several black spots on the neck. This bird is migratory in the United States, passing along the sea-coast as well as in the interior; a few breed in New Jersey, on the Raritan, Passaic, and Hackensack rivers; but on the Delaware and its tributaries, which abound with wild rice, it is exceedingly abundant, as it is also in the great northwestern lakes and rivers which are all plentifully supplied with this its favorite food. It is rarely killed in New York or to the eastward, though a few are found on the flats of the Hudson. It winters for the most part to the south of the United States, although a few pass the cold season in the tepid swamps and morasses of Florida and Louisiana. All this is now ascertained beyond doubt, but till within a few years all sorts of strange fabulous tales have been in circulation concerning the habits of this bird; arising from the circumstance of its very sudden and mysterious arrival and disappearance on its breeding-grounds, the marshes being one day literally alive with them, and the next solitary and deserted. Add to this its difficult, short, and laborious flight, apparently so inadequate to the performance of migrations thousands of miles in length, and it will be easy to conceive that the vulgar, the ignorant, and the prejudiced, should have been unable to comprehend the possibility of its aërial voyages, and should have endeavored to account for their disappearance by insisting that they burrow into the mud and become torpid during the winter, as I have myself heard men maintain, incredulous and obstinate against conviction. Audubon has thought it necessary gravely, and at some length, to controvert this absurd fallacy, and in doing so has recorded the