W H 1 T E*8

SELBORNE

&B> 220 ■y-Pl

Presented to the LIBRARY of the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO by

Hugh Anson-Cartwright

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from University of Toronto

https://archive.org/details/naturalhistoryof01whit

White's House “ The Wakes,’ ’ from the garden.

Natural History

OF

AND

OBSERVATIONS ON NATURE

BY

GILBERT WHITE

WITH THE TEXT AND NEW LETTERS OF THE BUCKLAND EDITION

INTRODUCTION BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

CLIFTON JOHNSON

TORONTO

MUSSON BOOK CO., Limited

1 904

THIS EDITION IS LIMITED TO TWO HUNDRED SETS

NUMBERED

3Z

AND SIGNED BY THE PUBLISHERS.

President

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

VOL. I.

White’s house, “ The Wakes,” from the garden Interior of Selborne church ....

Under the great yew in Selborne churchyard . Faringdon church ......

Selborne church from the short lythe A Faringdon byway .

White’s grave .......

A stile in the long lythe .....

Selborne from the Hanger . . . .

A bit of Selborne village .....

The Plestor .

An old chalk-pit .

Wolmer forest .

Wolmer pond .......

One of the old Selborne houses A snipe ........

The great yew in the churchyard A corn-rick in Norton farmyard A white rook .......

A bird’s nest found ......

The butcher’s shop .

A friendly chat on Selborne street . Stonehenge .......

Cottages next to “ The Wakes ”

Beeches in the long lythe ....

A cottage in the lythe .....

A family of landrails ....

	PAGE
Frontispiece
•	X
•	xiii
. .	XV
Facing	xv i
•	xviii
.	xxii
• •	xxiii
Facing	I
• .	2
•	6
• •	IO
Facing	IS
•	27
•	33
.	39
•	48
• •	54
. •	53
• •	63
• •	/i
• •	77
Facing	Si
•	93
Facing	96
Facing	93
• •	99

v

Among the hedgerows Golden-crested wrens The cuckoo A hedgehog Song thrushes .

The backdoor walk to a cottage garden Ring-ousels A “ rookstarver ”

A fieldfare

Entrance to an old Sel borne lane A redwing

A rook ....

A starling

In a Selborne beechwood A crow ....

A bullfinch Lapwings House martins .

White’s sundial at the bottom of his garden A rookery ......

PAGE

. . 108

. 113

. 121

. 124

. 129

Facing 132 . 140

• 143

• 153

. 162

. 167

• 173

. 174

Facing 183 . 190

. 192

• 193

• 195 Facing 202 Facing 207

VI

INTRODUCTION.

One of the few books which I can return to and re-read every six or seven years is this book of Gil¬ bert White’s. It has a perennial charm. It is much like country things themselves. One does not read it with excitement or eager avidity ; it is in a low key ; it touches only upon minor matters ; it is not eloquent, or witty, or profound ; it has only now and then a twinkle of humour or a glint of fancy, and yet it has lived an hundred years and promises to live many hundreds of years more. So many learned and elaborate treatises have sunk beneath the waves upon which this cockle-shell of a book rides so safely and buoyantly ! What is the secret of its longevity ? One can do little more than name its qualities without tracing them to their sources. It is simple and wholesome, like bread, or meat, or milk. Perhaps it is just this same unstrained qual¬ ity that keeps the book alive. Books that are pi¬ quant and exciting like condiments, or cloying like confectionery or pastry, it seems, have a much less

Vll

chance of survival. The secret of longevity of a man — what is it? Sanity, moderation, regularity, and that plus vitality, which is a gift. The book that lives has these things, and it has that same plus vitality, the secret of which cannot be explored. The sensational, intemperate books set the world on fire for a day, and then end in ashes and forget¬ fulness.

White’s book diffuses a sort of rural England at¬ mosphere through the mind. It is not the work of a city man who went down into the country to write it up, but of a born countryman — one who had in the very texture of his mind the flavour of rural things. Then it is the growth of a particular local¬ ity. Let a man stick his staff into the ground any¬ where and say “This is home,” and describe things from that point of view, or as they stand related to that spot — the weather, the fauna, the flora — and his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus located and defined. This is one secret of White’s charm. His work has a home air, a certain privacy and particularity. The great world is afar off ; Selborne is as snug and secluded as a chimney corner; we get an authentic glimpse into the real life of one man there; we see him go¬ ing about intent, lovingly intent, upon every phase of nature about him. We get glimpses into humble cottages and into the ways and doings of the people; we see the bacon drying in the chimneys; we see

viii

the poor gathering- in Wolmer Forest the sticks and twigs dropped by the rooks in building their nests ; we see them claiming the “ lop and top ” when the big trees are cut. Indeed, the human touches, the human figures here and there in White’s pages add much to the interest. The glimpses we get of his own goings and comings — we wish there were more of them. We should like to know what took him to London during that great snow-storm of January, 1776, or how he got there, inasmuch as the roads were so blocked by the snow that the carriages from Bath with their fine ladies on their way to attend the Queen’s birthday were unable to get through. “ The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers if they would shovel them a track to Lon¬ don, but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed.” The parson found the city bedded deep in snow, and so noiseless by reason of it that “ it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of deso¬ lation.”

When one reads the writers of our own day upon rural England and the wild life there, he finds that they have not the charm of the Selborne naturalist ; mainly, I think, because they go out with deliberate intent to write up nature. They choose their theme; the theme does not choose them. They love the birds and flowers for the literary effects they can produce out of them. It requires no great talent to go out in the fields or woods and describe in grace-

IX

ful sentences what one sees there — birds, trees, flow¬ ers. clouds, streams, etc. ; but to give the atmosphere of these things, to seize the significant and interesting

Interior of Selborne Church.

x

features and to put the reader into sympathetic com¬ munication with them, that is another matter.

Hence back of all, the one thing that has told most in keeping White’s book alive is undoubtedly its sound style — sentences actually filled with the living breath of a man. We are everywhere face to face with something genuine and real ; objects, ideas, stand out on the page ; the articulation is easy and distinct. The style of the born writer is like an open fire : we are in direct communication with his mind; we see the play of the forces at work ; we get that precious sense of reality. All this is true of White’s pages. Vet he had no literary ambitions. His style is that of a scholar, but of a scholar devoted to natural knowledge. There was evidently something winsome and charming about the man personally, and these qualities reappear in his pages.

White was a type of the true observer — the man with the detective eye. He did not seek to read his own thoughts and theories into Nature, but sub¬ mitted his mind to her with absolute frankness and ingenuousness. He had infinite curiosity, and de- lighted in nothing so much as a new fact about the birds and the wild life around him. To see the thing as it was in itself and in its relations, that was his am¬ bition. He could resist the tendency of his own mind to believe without sufficient evidence. Apparently he wanted to fall in with the notion current during the last century, that swallows hybernated in the

J ' J

XI

mud in the bottoms of streams and ponds, but he could not gather convincing proof. It was not enough that a few belated specimens were seen in the fall lingering about such localities, or again hov¬ ering over them early in spring ; or that some old grandfather had seen a man who had taken live swallows out of the mud. Produce the man and let us cross-question him — that was White’s attitude. Dr. Johnson said confidently that swallows did thus pass the winter in the mud “ conglobulated into a ball,” but Johnson had that literary cast of mind that prefers a picturesque statement to the exact fact. White was led astray by no literary ambition. His interest in the life of nature was truly a scientific one ; he must know the fact first, and then give it to the humanities. How true it is in science, in literature, in life, that any secondary motives vitiate the result ! Seek ye the kingdom of truth first and all things shall be added.

But White seems finally to have persuaded him¬ self that at least a few swallows passed the winter in England in a torpid state — if not in the bottom of streams or ponds, then in holes in their banks. He reasoned from analogy, though he had expressed his distrust of the mode of reasoning. If bats, insects, toads, turtles, and other creatures can thus pass the winter, why not swallows? On many different occasions of a mild day late in the fall, and early in the spring, he saw house-martins flying about ; on

Xll

the weather suddenly changing- to colder, they quick¬ ly disappeared. Bats and turtles came forth and then vanished in the same way. White finally con-

Under the great yew in Selbome Churchyard.

eluded that the mystery was the same in both cases — that the creatures were brought from their winter retreats by the warmth, only to retire to them again when it changed to cold. If he had

xni

adhered to his usual caution he would have waited for actual proof of this fact — the finding of a torpid swallow. He made frequent search for such, but never found any.

This notion so long current about the swallows probably had its origin in two things : first, their partiality for mud as nesting material ; and secondly, the habit of these birds, after they have begun to collect into flocks in midsummer, preparatory to their migrations, of passing the night in vast numbers along the margins of streams and ponds. White knew of their habits in this respect, and wanted to see in the fact presumptive evidence of the truth of the notion that, though they may not retire into the water itself, yet that they “ may conceal them¬ selves in the banks of pools and rivers during the un¬ comfortable months of the year.” One midsummer twilight in northern Vermont I came upon hundreds of swallows — barn and cliff — settled for the night upon some low alders that grew upon the margin of a deep still pool in the river. The bushes bent down with them as with an over-load of fruit. This attraction for the water on the part of the swallow family is certainly a curious one, and is not easily ex¬ plained.

Our sharp-eyed parson had observed that the nesting habits of birds afford a clue to their roosting habits ; that they usually pass the night in such places as they build their nests. Thus, the tree-build-

Xiv

ers roost in trees ; the ground-builders upon the ground. I have seen our chickadee and woodpeck¬ er enter, late in the day, the cavities in decaying limbs of trees. I have seen the oriole dispose of her¬ self for the night on the end of a maple branch where her “ pendent bed and procreant cradle ” was begun a few days later. In walking through the summer fields in the twilight, the vesper sparrow or the song sparrow will oft¬ en start up from almost beneath one’s feet. It is said that the snow - bunting will plunge be¬ neath the snow and pass the night there. The ruffed grouse often does this, but the swallows seem to be an exception to this rule. I have seen a vast cloud of swifts take up their

lodging for the night in a tall, unused chimney; but the barn swallows and the cliff and white-bellied

Fa ) ingdon Ch urck.

2

xv

swallows, at least after the young- have flown, ap¬ pear to pass the night in the vicinity of streams. White noticed also — and here the true observer again crops out — that the fieldfare, a kind of thrush, though a tree-builder, yet always appears to pass the night on the ground. “ The larkers, in drag¬ ging their nets by night, frequently catch them in the wheat stubbles." He learned, as every observer sooner or later learns, to be careful of sweeping statements — that the truth of nature is not always caught by the biggest generalisations. After speak¬ ing of the birds that dust themselves, earth their plumage — pulveratrices , as he calls them — he says : “As far as I can observe, many birds that dust themselves never wash, and I once thought that those birds that wash themselves would never dust ; but here I find myself mistaken," and instances the house sparrow as doing both. White seems to have been about the first writer upon natural history who observed things minutely ; he saw through all those

O J o

sort of sleight-o'-hand movements and ways of the birds and beasts. He held his eye firmly to the point. He saw the swallows feed their young on the wing : he saw the fern-owl while hawking about a large oak “ put out its short leg while on the wing, and by a bend of the head deliver something into its mouth.” This explained to him the use of its middle toe, “ which is curiously furnished with a ser¬ rated claw." He times the white owls feeding their

XVI

Selbome Church from the short lythe ,

young under the eaves of his church, with watch in hand. He saw them transfer the mouse they brought from the foot to the beak, that they might have the free use of the former in ascending to the nest.

In his walks and drives about the country he was all attention to the life about him, simply from his delight in any fresh bit of natural knowledge. His curiosity never flagged. He had naturally an alert mind. His style reflects this alertness and sensitive¬ ness. In his earlier days he was an enthusiastic sportsman, and he carried the sportsman’s trained sense and love of the chase into his natural-history studies. He complained that faunists were too apt to content themselves with general terms and bare descriptions ; the reason, he says, is plain — “ be¬ cause all that may be done at home in a man’s study ; but the investigation of the life and conversa¬ tion of animals is a concern of much more trouble and difficulty, and is not to be attained but by the active and inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the country.” He himself had the true inquisi¬ tiveness and activity, and the loving, discriminating eve. He saw the specific marks and differences at a glance. Then, his love of these things was so well known in the neighbourhood, that this kind of knowl¬ edge flowed to him from all sides. He was a magnet that attracted all the fresh, natural lore about him. People brought him birds and eggs and nests, and

XVII

A Faringdon byway.

animals or any natural curiosity, and reported to him any unusual occurrence. They loaned him the use of their eyes and ears. One day a countryman told

xviii

him he had found a young- fern-owl in the nest of a small bird on the ground, and that it was fed by the little bird. “ I went to see this extraordinary phenomenon, and found that it was a young cuckoo hatched in the nest of a titlark ; it was become vastly too big for its nest, appearing to have its large wings extended beyond the nest,'’

‘ in tenui re

Majores pennaes nido, extendisse,’

and was very fierce and pugnacious, pursuing my finger, as I teased it, for many feet from the nest, and sparring and buffetting with its wings like a gamecock. The dupe of a dam appeared at a dis¬ tance, hovering about with meat in its mouth, and expressing the greatest solicitude.”

He observed that the train of the peacock was really not its tail, but an entirely separate appendage, lie remarked how extremely fond cats are of fish, and yet of all quadrupeds “are the least disposed towards the water.” This is a curious fact to him. A neighbour of his, in ploughing late in the fall, turned a water-rat out of his hybernaculum in a field far re- moved from any water. The rat had laid up above a gallon of potatoes for its winter food. This was another curious fact that set the writer speculating His correspondent tells him of a heronry near some manor-house that excites his curiosity much. “ Four¬ score nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity

xix

which I would ride half as many miles to get a sight of.” Such a lively curiosity had the parson. His thirst for exact knowledge was so great, that on one occasion he took measurements of the carcass of a moose when he was probably compelled to hold his nose to finish the task. At one place he heard of a woman who professed to cure cancers by the use of toads ; some of his brother clergymen believed the story, but when he came to sift the evi¬ dence he made up his mind that the woman was a fraud.

He said truly, “ There is such a propensity in man¬ kind towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate anything from common report, especially in print, without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion.”

The observations of hardly one man in five hun¬ dred are of any value for scientific purposes.

Wh ite had the true scientific caution, and was, as a rule, very careful to verify his statements.

Of course the science of White’s time was far be¬ hind our own. The phenomenon of the weather, for instance, was not understood then as it is now. The great atmospheric waves that sweep across the con¬ tinents and the regular alternations of heat and cold were unsuspected. White observes that cold de¬ scended from above, but he thought that thaws often originated under ground, “ from warm vapours which arise.” He was greatly puzzled, too, when, during

XX

the severe cold of December, 1784, the thermometer fell many degrees lower in the valley bottoms than on the hills. He had not observed that the very cold air on such occasions settles down into the val¬ leys and fills them like water, marking the height to which it rises by a level line upon the trees or foliage. It is a wonder that his sharp eye did not detect the true source of heavy dew, but it did not. He thought it proceeded from the effluvia of flowers, which, being drawn up into the sky by the warmth of the sun by day, descended again as dew by night.

When a French anatomist announced that he had discovered why the cuckoo did not hatch its own eggs — namely, because the crop or craw of the bird was placed back of the sternum, so as to make a pro¬ tuberance on the belly — White dissected a cuckoo for himself, and, finding the fact as stated, proceeded to dissect other birds that he knew did incubate, as the fern-owl and a hawk ; and finding the craw situ¬ ated the same as in the cuckoo, justly charged the Frenchman with having reached an unscientific con¬ clusion.

In his seventy-seventh letter White clearly antici¬ pates Darwin as to the beneficial functions of earth¬ worms in the soil, and tells farmers and gardeners that the little creatures which they look upon as their enemy is really their best friend.

Changes are slow in England. All the essential

o o

features of Selborne remain about as they were in

XXI

White’s time. It is still a humble rural village. His church, his house, the Hanger, Wolmer Forest, the old yew, all remain. I spent two days there in June, 1882. The pictures of Mr. Johnson that illustrate this edition, taken as they were from the actual scenes, bring back the memory of my visit very viv¬ idly. The stone that marks White’s grave has only his initials upon it. I could not see any signs of its being visited any of- tener than the un¬ known graves. At the inn a copy of his book was not to be had. In a meadow near the church the haymakers, mostly women, were at work. A mother set her baby down amid the hay, where it cried long and lustily while she continued uncon¬ cerned with her rake. I walked amid the noble but dripping beeches of the Hanger and along green lanes and across fields in other directions. I saw and heard the black-cap

White s grave.

xxn

warbler, but took little note of other birds. I was more especially in quest of the nightingale, but failed to find her.

Rural England has charms of which we get but faint glimpses in this country, and I found Selborne deeply interesting in itself, as well as for its associa¬ tions with the famous nature-loving parson.

John Burroughs.

April , iSgy.

A stile in the long lythe.

xxm

Selbome from the Hanger.

THE

NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.

LETTER I.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

The parish of SELBORNE lies in the extreme east¬ ern corner of the county of Hampshire, bordering on the county of Sussex, and not far from the county of Surrey ; it is about fifty miles south-west of Lon¬ don, in latitude 510, and near midway between the towns of Alton and Petersfield. Being very large and extensive, it abuts on twelve parishes, two of which are in Sussex, viz., Trotton and Rogate. If you begin from the south and proceed westward the adjacent parishes are Emshot, Newton Valence, Far- ingdon, Hartelev-Mauduit, Great Wardleham, Kings¬ ley, Hedleigh, Bramshot, Trotton, Rogate, Lysse, and Greatham. The soils of this district are almost as various and diversified as the views and aspects. The high part to the south-west consists of a vast hill of chalk, rising three hundred feet above the village, and is divided into a sheep down, the high wood, and a long hanging wood called the Hanger.

The covert of this eminence is altogether beech, the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or grace¬ ful pendulous boughs. The down, or sheep-walk, is a pleasant park-like spot, of about one mile by half that space, jutting out on the verge of the hill-coun¬ try, where it begins to break down into the plains, and commanding a very engaging view, being an assemblage of hill, dale, woodlands, heath, and water.

A bit of Selborne village.

The prospect is bounded to the south-east and east by the vast range of mountains called the Sussex downs, by Guilddown near Guildford, and by the downs round Dorking, and Ryegate in Surrey, to

the north-east, which altogether, with the country beyond Alton and Farnham, form a noble and exten¬ sive outline.

At the foot of this hill, one stage or step from the uplands, lies the village, which consists of one single straggling street, three-quarters of a mile in length, in a sheltered vale, and running parallel with the Hanger. The houses are divided from the hill by a vein of stiff clay (good wheat land), yet stand on a rock of white stone, little in appearance removed from chalk ; but seems so far from being calcareous, that it endures extreme heat. Yet that the freestone still preserves somewhat that is analogous to chalk, is plain from the beeches which descend as low as those rocks extend, and no farther, and thrive as well on them, where the ground is steep, as on the chalks.

The cart-way of the village divides, in a remark¬ able manner, two very incongruous soils. To the south-west is a rank clay, that requires the labour of years to render it mellow ; while the gardens to the north-east, and small inclosures behind, consist of a warm, forward, crumbling mould, called black malm, which seems highly saturated with vegetable and animal manure ; and these may perhaps have been the original site of the town ; while the woods and coverts might extend down to the opposite bank.

At each end of the village, which runs from south-east to north-west, arises a small rivulet : that

3

at the north-west end frequently fails ; but the other is a fine perennial spring, called Well-head, little in¬ fluenced by drought or wet seasons, inasmuch as it produced on the 14th September, 1781, after a se¬ vere hot summer and a preceding dry spring and winter, nine gallons of water in a minute, at a time when many of the wells failed, and all the ponds in the vales were dry.

This spring breaks out of some high grounds joining to Xore Hill, a noble chalk promontory, re¬ markable for sending forth two streams into two different seas. The one to the south becomes a branch of the Arun, running to Arundel, and so fall¬ ing into the British Channel : the other to the north. The Selborne stream makes one branch of the Wey ; and, meeting the Blackdown stream at Hed- leigh, and the Alton and Farnham stream at Tilford Bridge, swells into a considerable river, navigable at Godaiming ; from whence it passes to Guildford, and so into the Thames at Weybridge ; and thus at the Xore into the German Ocean.

Our wells, at an average, run to about sixty-three feet, and when sunk to that depth seldom fail ; but produce a fine limpid water, soft to the taste, and much commended by those who drink the pure ele¬ ment, but which does not lather well with soap.

To the north-west, north, and east of the village is a range of fair inclosures, consisting of what is

called a white malm, a sort of rotten or rubble stone,

4

which, when turned up to the frost and rain, moul¬ ders to pieces and becomes manure to itself.

Still on to the north-east, and a step lower, is a kind of white land, neither chalk nor clay, neither fit for pasture nor for the plough, yet kindly for hops, which root deep into the freestone, and have their poles and wood for charcoal growing just at hand. This white soil produces the brightest hops.

As the parish still inclines down towards Wol- mer Forest, at the juncture of the clays and sand, the soil becomes a wet, sandy loam, remarkable for its timber and infamous for roads. The oaks of Temple and Blackmoor stand high in the estimation of purveyors, and have furnished much naval tim¬ ber ; while the trees on the freestone grow large, but are what workmen call shaky, and so brittle as often to fall to pieces in sawing. Beyond the sandy loam the soil becomes a hungry lean sand, till it min¬ gles with the forest; and will produce little without the assistance of lime and turnips.

LETTER II.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

In the court of Norton farmhouse, a manor-farm to the north-west of the village, on the white malm,

stood within these twenty years a broad-leaved elm,

5

or wych hazel, Ulmus folio latissirno scabro, of Ray, which, though it had lost a considerable leading bough, equal to a moderate tree, in the great storm in the year 1703, yet, when felled, contained eight loads of timber ; and being too bulky for carriage, was sawn off at seven feet above the butt, where it meas¬ ured near eight feet in the diameter. This elm I mention to show to what a bulk planted elms may attain ; as this tree must certainly have been such from its situation.

In the centre of the village, and near the church, is a square piece of ground surrounded by houses,

The P lest or.

and vulgarly called the Plestor. In the midst of this

spot stood, in old times, a vast oak, with a short

6

squat body and huge horizontal arms, extending almost to the extremity of the area. This venerable tree, surrounded with stone steps, and seats above them, was the delight of old and young, and a place of much resort in summer evenings ; where the for¬ mer sat in grave debate, while the latter frolicked and danced before them. Long might it have stood, had not the amazing tempest in 1703 overturned it at once, to the infinite regret of the inhabitants and the vicar, who bestowed several pounds in setting it in its place again : but all his care could not avail ; the tree sprouted for a time, then withered and died. This oak I mention to show to what a bulk planted oaks also may arrive : and planted this tree must cer¬ tainly have been, as appears from what is known concerning the antiquities of the village.

On the Blackmoor estate there is a small wood called Losel’s, of a few acres, that was lately fur¬ nished with a set of oaks of a peculiar growth and great value ; they were tall and taper like firs, but standing near together had very small heads, only a little brush without any large limbs. About twenty years ago, the bridge at the Toy, near Hampton Court, being much decayed, some trees were wanted for the repairs that were fifty feet long without bough, and would measure twelve inches diameter at the little end. Twenty such trees did a pur¬ veyor find in this little wood, with this advan¬ tage, that many of them answered the description

at sixty feet. These trees were sold at twenty pounds apiece.

In the centre of this grove there stood an oak, which, though shapely and tall on the whole, bulged out into a large excrescence about the middle of the stem. On this a pair of ravens had fixed their resi¬ dence for such a series of years, that the oak was dis- tinguished by the title of the Raven Tree. Many were the attempts of the neighbouring youths to get at this eyry : the difficulty whetted their inclinations, and each was ambitious of surmounting the arduous task. But when they arrived at the swelling:, it jutted out so in their way, and was so far beyond their grasp, that the most daring lads were awed, and acknowledged the undertaking to be too hazard¬ ous. So the ravens built on, nest upon nest, in per¬ fect security, till the fatal day arrived in which the wood was to be levelled. It was in the month of February, when those birds usually sit. The saw was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted into the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blows of the beetle or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall ; but still the dam sat on. At last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from her nest ; and, though her parental affection deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead to the ground.

8

LETTER III.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

The fossil-shells of this district, and sorts of stone, such as have fallen within my observation, must not be passed over in silence. And first I must mention, as a great curiosity, a specimen that was ploughed up in the chalky fields, near the side of the down, and given to me for the singularity of its appear¬ ance ; which, to an incurious eye, seems like a petri¬ fied fish of about four inches long, the cardo (hinge) passing for a head and mouth. It is in reality a bivalve of the Linnsean genus of Mytiliis , and the species of Crista Galli ; called by Lister, Rastellum ; by Rumphius, Ostreum plicatum minus ; by D’Argen- ville, Anris porci , s. Crista Galli ; and by those who make collections, cock’s comb. Though I applied to several such in London, I never could meet with an entire specimen ; nor could I ever find in books any engraving from a perfect one. In the superb mu¬ seum at Leicester House, permission was given me to examine for this article ; and though I was disap¬ pointed as to the fossil, I was highly gratified with the sight of several of the shells themselves in high preservation. This bivalve is only known to inhabit the Indian Ocean, where it fixes itself to a zoophyte known by the name Gorgonia. The curious foldings

of the suture, the one into the other, the alternate

9

flutings or grooves, and the curved form of my speci¬ men are much easier expressed by the pencil than by words.

Cornua Ammonis are very common about this vil¬ lage. As we were cutting an inclining path up the Hanger, the labourers found them frequently on that steep, just under the soil, in the chalk, and of a con-

An old chalk pit.

siderable size. In the lane above Well-head, in the way to Emshot, they abound in the bank, in a dark¬ ish sort of marl, and are usually very small and soft : but in Clay’s Pond, a little farther on, at the end of the pit, where the soil is dug out for manure, I have occasionally observed them of large dimensions, per¬ haps fourteen or sixteen inches in diameter. But as these did not consist of firm stone, but were formed

IO

of a kind of terra lapidosa, or hardened clay, as soon as they were exposed to the rains and frost they mouldered away. These seemed as if they were of very recent production. In the chalk-pit, at the north-west end of the Hanger, large nautili are some¬ times observed.

In the very thickest strata of our freestone, and at considerable depths, well-diggers often find large scallops or pectines , having both shells deeply stri¬ ated, and ridged and furrowed alternately. They are highly impregnated with, if not wholly com¬ posed of, the stone of the quarry.

LETTER IV.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

As in a former letter the freestone of this place has been only mentioned incidentally, I shall here become more particular. This stone is in great re¬ quest for hearthstones and the beds of ovens ; and in lining of lime-kilns it turns to good account ; for the workmen use sandy loam instead of mortar; the sand of which fluxes, and runs by the intense heat, and so cases over the whole face of the kiln with a strong vitrified coat like glass, that it is well preserved from injuries of weather, and endures thirty or forty years. When chiselled smooth, it makes elegant fronts for

houses, equal in colour and grain to the Bath stone ; and superior in one respect, that, when seasoned, it does not scale. Decent chimney-pieces are worked from it of much closer and finer grain than Portland ; and rooms are floored with it ; but it proves rather too soft for this purpose. It is a freestone, cutting in all directions ; yet has something of a grain parallel with the horizon, and therefore should not be sur- bedded — that is, set edgewise, contrary to its position in the quarry — but laid in the same position that it occupies there. On the ground abroad this fire-stone will not succeed for pavements, because, probably, some degree of saltness prevailing within it, the rain tears the slabs to pieces.* Though this stone is too hard to be acted on by vinegar, yet both the white part and even the blue rag ferment strongly in min¬ eral acids. Though the white stone will not bear wet, yet in every quarry at intervals there are thin strata of blue rag, which resist rain and frost, and are excellent for pitching of stables, paths, and courts, and for building of dry walls against banks; a valu¬ able species of fencing, much in use in this village ; and for mending of roads. This rag is rugged and stubborn, and will not hew to a smooth face ; but is very durable : yet, as these strata are shallow and lie deep, large quantities cannot be procured but at con-

* “Fire-stone is full of salts, and has no sulphur: it must be close grained, and have no interstices. Nothing supports fire like salts ; salt- stone perishes when exposed to wet and frost.” — Plot’s Staff, p. 152.

12

siderable expense. Among the blue rags turn up some blocks tinged with a stain of yellow or rust colour, which seem to be nearly as lasting as the blue ; and every now and then balls of a friable substance, like rust of iron, called rust balls.

In Wolmer Forest, I see but one sort of stone, called by the workmen sand or forest-stone. This is generally of the colour of rusty iron, and might probably be worked as iron ore : is very hard and heavy, and of a firm, compact texture, and composed of a small roundish crystalline grit, cemented to¬ gether by a brown, terrene, ferruginous matter ; will not cut without difficulty, nor easily strike fire with steel. Being often found in broad flat pieces, it makes good pavement for paths about houses, never be¬ coming slippery in frost or rain ; is excellent for dry walls, and is sometimes used in buildings. In many parts of that waste it lies scattered on the surface of the ground, but is dug on Weaver's Down, a vast hill on the eastern verge of that forest, where the pits are shallow and the stratum thin. This stone is imperishable.

From a notion of rendering their work the more elegant, and giving it a finish, masons chip this stone into small fragments about the size of the head of a large nail, and then stick the pieces into the wet mortar along the joints of their freestone walls : this embellishment carries an odd appearance, and has

occasioned strangers sometimes to ask us pleasantly “ whether we fastened our walls together with ten- penny nails.”

LETTER V.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

Among the singularities of this place the two rocky hollow lanes, the one to Alton, and the other to the forest, deserve our attention. These roads, running through the malm lands, are, by the traffic of ages, and the fretting of water, worn down through the first stratum of our freestone, and partly through the second ; so that they look more like water-courses than roads ; and are bedded with naked rag for furlongs together. In many places they are reduced sixteen or eighteen feet beneath the level of the fields ; and after floods, and in frosts, exhibit very grotesque and wild appearances, from the tangled roots that are twisted among the strata, and from the torrents rushing down their broken sides ; and especially when those cascades are frozen into icicles, hanging in all the fanciful shapes of frost-work. These rugged, gloomy scenes affright the ladies when they peep down into them from the paths above, and make timid horsemen shud¬ der while they ride along them ; but delight the

naturalist with their various botany, and particu-

14

larly with the curious filices with which they abound.

The manor of Selborne, were it strictly looked after, with all its kindly aspects, and all its sloping coverts, would swarm with game ; even now hares, partridges, and pheasants abound ; and in old days woodcocks were as plentiful. There are few quails, because they more affect open fields than inclosures ; after harvest some few landrails are seen.

The parish of Selborne, by taking in so much of the forest, is a vast district. Those who tread the bounds are employed part of three days in the busi¬ ness, and are of opinion that the outline, in all its curves and indentings, does not comprise less than thirty miles.

The village stands in a sheltered spot, secured by the Hanger from the strong westerly winds. The air is soft, but rather moist from the effluvia of so many trees ; yet perfectly healthy and free from agues.

The quantity of rain that falls on it is very con¬ siderable, as may be supposed in so woody and mountainous a district. As my experience in meas¬ uring the water is but of short date, I am not quali¬ fied to give the mean quantity, but a very intelligent gentleman assures me (and he speaks from upwards of forty years’ experience) that the mean rain of any place cannot be ascertained till a person has meas¬ ured it for a very long period. I only know that

15

Inch. Hund.

From May I, 1779, to the end of the year there fell . 28 37 !

From Jan. I, 1780, to Jan. 1, 1781 . 27 32

From Jan. 1, 1781, to Jan. 1, 1782 . 30 71

From Jan. 1, 1782, to Jan. 1, 1783 . 50 26 !

From Jan. 1, 1783, to Jan. 1, 1784 . 33 71

From Jan. I, 1784, to Jan. 1, 1785 . 38 80

From Jan. 1, 1785, to Jan. 1, 1786 ....... 31 55

From Jan. 1, 1786, to Jan. 1, 1787 . 39 57

The village of Selborne, and the large hamlet of Oakhanger, with the single farms, and many scat¬ tered houses along the verge of the forest, contain upwards of six hundred and seventy inhabitants.

We abound with poor ; many of whom are sober and industrious, and live comfortably in good stone or brick cottages, which are glazed, and have cham¬ bers above stairs : mud buildings we have none. Besides the employment from husbandry, the men work in hop-gardens, of which we have many ; and fell and bark timber. In the spring and summer the women weed the corn ; and enjoy a second har¬ vest in September by hop-picking. Formerly, in the dead months they availed themselves greatly by spinning wool, for making of barragons, a genteel corded stuff, much in vogue at that time for summer wear ; and chiefly manufactured at Alton, a neigh¬ bouring town, by some of the people called Quakers. The inhabitants enjoy a good share of health and longevity, and the parish swarms with children.

16

LETTER VI.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

Should I omit to describe with some exactness the Forest of Wolmer, of which three-fifths perhaps lie in this parish, my account of Selborne would be very imperfect, as it is a district abounding with many curious productions, both animal and vege¬ table, and has often afforded me much entertainment both as a sportsman and as a naturalist.

The royal Forest of Wolmer is a tract of land of about seven miles in length by two-and-a-half in breadth, running nearly from north to south, and is abutted on — to begin to the south, and so to pro¬ ceed eastward — by the parishes of Greatham, Lysse, Rotate, and Trotton, in the county of Sussex; by Bramshot, Hedleigh, and Kingsley. This royalty consists entirely of sand, covered with heath and fern ; but is somewhat diversified with hills and dales, without having one standing tree in the whole extent. In the bottoms, where the waters stagnate, are many bogs, which formerly abounded with sub¬ terraneous trees ; though Dr. Plot says positively * that “ there never were any fallen trees hidden in the mosses of the southern counties.” But he was mis¬ taken : for I myself have seen cottages on the verge

* See his History of Staffordshire.

17

of this wild district whose timbers consisted of a black hard wood, looking like oak, which the owners assured me they procured from the bogs by probing the soil with spits, or some such instruments : but the peat is so much cut out, and the moors have been so well examined, that none has been found of late. Old people, however, have assured me that on a winter’s morning they have discovered these trees in the bogs by the hoar frost, which lay longer over the space where they were concealed than on the surrounding morass. Nor does this seem to be a fanciful notion, but consistent with true philosophy. Besides the oak, I have also been shown pieces of fossil wood, of a paler colour and softer nature, which the inhabitants called fir : but, upon a nice exami¬ nation, and trial by fire, I could discover nothing res¬ inous in them ; and therefore rather suppose that they were parts of a willow or alder, or some such aquatic tree.

This lonely domain is a very agreeable haunt for many sorts of wild fowls, which not only frequent it in the winter, but breed there in the summer ; such as lapwings, snipes, wild ducks, and, as I have dis¬ covered within these few years, teals. Partridges in vast plenty are bred in good seasons on the verge of this forest, into which they love to make excur¬ sions : and in particular in the dry summer of 1740 and 1741, and some years after, they swarmed to

such a degree that parties of unreasonable sports-

18

4

Wolmer forest.

■

■

-

men killed twenty and sometimes thirty brace in a day.

But there was a nobler species of game in this forest, now extinct, which I have heard old people say abounded much before shooting flying became so common, and that was the heath-cock, or black ^ame. When I was a little boy I recollect one com- ing now and then to my father’s table. The last pack remembered was killed about thirty-five vears ago ; and within these ten vears one solitary grey hen was sprung by some beagles in beating for a hare. The sportsman cried out, “A hen pheasant!" but a gen¬ tleman present, who had often seen black game in the north of England, assured me that it was a grey hen.

Xor does the loss of our black game prove the only gap in the Fauna Selborniensis ; for another beautiful link in the chain of beings is wanting : I mean the red-deer, which towards the beginning of this century amounted to about five hundred head, and made a stately appearance. There is an old keeper, now alive, named Adams, whose great-grand¬ father (mentioned in a perambulation taken in 1635), grandfather, father and self, enjoyed the head keeper- ship of Wolmer Forest in succession for more than a hundred years. This person assures me, that his father has often told him, that Queen Anne, as she was journeying on the Portsmouth road, did not think the forest of Wolmer beneath her royal regard.

*9

For she came out of the great road at Lippock, which is just by, and, reposing herself on a bank smoothed for that purpose, lying about half a mile to the east of Wolmer Pond, and still called Queen’s Bank, saw with great complacency and satisfaction the whole herd of red-deer brought by the keepers along the vale before her, consisting then of about five hundred head. A sight this worthy the atten¬ tion of the greatest sovereign ! But he farther adds that, by means of the Waltham blacks, or, to use his own expression, as soon as they began blacking, they were reduced to about fifty head, and so continued decreasing till the time of the late Duke of Cumber¬ land. About the year 1737, his highness sent down a huntsman, and six yeomen-prickers, in scarlet jack¬ ets laced with gold, attended by the stag-hounds ; ordering them to take every deer in this forest alive, and to convey them in carts to Windsor. In the course of the summer they caught every stag, some of which showed extraordinary diversion : but, in the following winter, when the hinds were also car¬ ried off, such fine chases were exhibited as served the country people for matter of talk and wonder for years afterwards. I saw m)Tself one of the yeomen- prickers single out a stag from the herd, and must confess it was the most curious feat of activity I ever beheld. The exertions made by the horse and deer much exceeded all my expectations; though the former greatly excelled the latter in speed. When

the devoted deer was separated from his companions, they gave him, by their watches, law, as they called it, for twenty minutes ; when, sounding their horns, the stop-dogs were permitted to pursue, and a most gallant scene ensued.

LETTER VII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

Though large herds of deer do much harm to the neighbourhood, yet the injury to the morals of the people is of more moment than the loss of their crops. The temptation is irresistible ; for most men are sportsmen by constitution : and there is such an inherent spirit for hunting in human nature, as scarce any inhibitions can restrain. Hence, towards the beginning of this century, all this country was wild about deer-stealing. Unless he was a hunter, as they affected to call themselves, no young person was allowed to be possessed of manhood or gallantry. The Waltham blacks at length committed such enor¬ mities, that Government was forced to interfere with that severe and sanguinary Act called the Black Act (9 Geo. I. c. 22), which comprehends more felonies than any law that ever was framed before. And therefore, Dr. Hoadley, the Bishop of Winchester,

when urged to re-stock Waltham-chase, refused, from

21

a motive worthy of a prelate, replying that “it had done mischief enough already.”

Our old race of deer-stealers are hardly extinct yet : it was but a little while ago that they used to recount, over their ale, the exploits of their youth ; such as watching the pregnant hind to her lair, and, when the calf was dropped, paring its feet with a penknife to the quick to prevent its escape, till it was large and fat enough to be killed ; the shooting at one of their neighbours with a bullet in a turnip- field by moonshine, mistaking him for a deer; and the losing a dog in the following extraordinary man¬ ner : — Some fellows, suspecting that a calf new-fallen was deposited in a certain spot of thick fern, went, with a lurcher, to surprise it ; when the parent hind rushed out of the brake, and, taking a vast spring with all her feet close together, pitched upon the neck of the dog, and broke it short in two.

Another temptation to idleness and sporting was a number of rabbits, which possessed all the hillocks and dry places ; but these being inconvenient to the huntsmen, on account of their burrows, when they came to take away the deer they permitted the coun¬ try people to destroy them all.

Such forests and wastes, when their allurements to irregularities are removed, are of considerable service to neighbourhoods that verge upon them, by furnishing them with peat and turf for their firing ; with fuel for the burning their lime ; and with ashes

22

for their grasses; and by maintaining their geese and their stock of young cattle at little or no expense.

The manor-farm of the parish of Greatham has an admitted claim, I see (by an old record taken from the Tower of London), of turning all live stock on the forest, at proper seasons, bidentibus except is. For this privilege the owner of that estate used to pay to the king annually seven bushels of oats. In the Holt Forest, where a full stock of fallow-deer has been kept up till lately, no sheep are admitted. The reason, I presume, being that sheep are such close grazers, they would pick out all the finest grasses, and hinder the deer from thriving.

Though (by statute 4 and 5 Wm. and Mary, c. 23) “to burn on any waste, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath, and furze gorse or fern, is punishable with whipping and confine¬ ment in the House of Correction ; ” yet, in this for¬ est, about March or April, according to the dryness of the season, such vast heath-fires are lighted up, that they often get to a masterless head, and, catch¬ ing the hedges, have sometimes been communicated to the underwoods, woods, and coppices, where great damage has ensued. The plea for these burn¬ ings is, that when the old coat of heath, &c., is con¬ sumed, young will sprout up and afford much tender browse for cattle ; but, where there is large old furze, the fire, following the roots, consumes the

very ground ; so that for hundreds of acres nothing

23

is to be seen but smother and desolation, the whole circuit round looking- like the cinders of a volcano ; and the soil being quite exhausted, no traces of vege¬ tation are to be found for years. These conflagra¬ tions, as they take place usually with a north-east or east wind, much annoy this village with their smoke, and often alarm the country ; and, once in particular, I remember that a gentleman, who lives beyond Andover, coming to my house, when he got on the downs between that town and Winchester, at twen¬ ty-five miles distance was surprised much with smoke and a hot smell of fire ; and concluded that Alresford was in flames ; but when he came to that town, he then had apprehensions for the next vil¬ lage, and so on to the end of his journey.*

On two of the most conspicuous eminences of this forest stand two arbours or bowers made of the boughs of oaks ; the one called Waldon Lodge, the other Brimstone Lodge : these the keepers renew

* This description reminds the scholar of the stubble-burning described in Virgil's “ Georgies,” i. S4, Mitford. There is no better fertilizer for the soil than the ashes of weeds and other vegetable growths, and this the poet knew.

“ Saepe etiam steriles incendere profuit agros,

Atque levem stipulam crepitantibus urere flammis :

Sive inde occultas vires et pabula terrae Pinguia concipiunt.”

“ Long practice has a sure improvement found,

With kindled fires to burn the barren ground ;

When the light stubble, to the flames resigned.

Is driven along, and crackles to the wind.” — Dryden.

24

annually on the feast of St. Barnabas, taking- the old materials for a perquisite. The farm called Black- moor, in this parish, is obliged to find the posts and brushwood for the former; while the farms at Great- ham, in rotation, furnish for the latter ; and are all enjoined to cut and deliver the materials at the spot. This custom I mention, because I look upon it to be of very remote antiquity.

LETTER VIII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

On the verge of the forest, as it is now circum¬ scribed, are three considerable lakes, two in Oak- hanger, of which I have nothing particular to say ; and one called Bin’s, or Bean’s Pond, which is worthy the attention of a naturalist or a sports¬ man. For, being crowded at the upper end with willows, and with the Care. x espitosa ; the sort which, rising into tall hassocks, is called by the for¬ esters, torrets ; a corruption, I suppose, of turrets ; it affords such a safe and pleasing shelter to wild ducks, teals, and snipes, that they breed there. In the winter this covert is also frequented by foxes, and sometimes by pheasants ; and the bogs produce many curious plants.

By a perambulation of Wolmer Forest and the

25

Holt, made in 1635, and in the eleventh year of Charles the First (which now lies before me), it appears that the limits of the former are much cir¬ cumscribed. For, to say nothing of the farther side, with which I am not so well acquainted, the bounds on this side, in old times, came into Binswood ; and extended to the ditch of Wardleham Park, in which stands the curious mount called King John’s Hill, and Lodge Hill ; and to the verge of Hartley Mau- duit, called Mauduit Hatch ; comprehending also Shortheath, Oakhanger, and Oakwoods ; a large dis¬ trict, now private property, though once belonging to the royal domain.

It is remarkable that the term purlieu is never once mentioned in this long roll of parchment. It contains, besides the perambulation, a rough estimate of the value of the timbers, which were consider¬ able, growing at that time in the district of the Holt; and enumerates the officers, superior and inferior, of those joint forests, for the time being, and their ostensible fees and perquisites. In those days, as at present, there were hardly any trees in Wolmer Forest.

Within the present limits of the forest are three considerable lakes, Hogmer, Cranmer, and Wolmer ; all of which are stocked with carp, tench, eels, and perch ; but the fish do not thrive well, because the water is hungry, and the bottoms are a naked sand.

A circumstance respecting these ponds, though

26

by no means peculiar to them, I cannot pass over in silence ; and that is, that instinct by which in sum-

Wolmer pond.

mer all the kine, whether oxen, cows, calves, or heifers, retire constantly to the water during the hotter hours ; where, being more exempt from flies, and inhaling the coolness of that element, some belly deep, and some only to mid-leg, they ruminate and solace themselves from about ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, and then return to their feed¬ ing. During this great proportion of the day they drop much dung, in which insects nestle ; and so supply food for the fish, which would be poorly sub¬ sisted but from this contingency. Thus nature, who

is a great economist, converts the recreation of one

27

animal to the support of another! Thomson, who was a nice observer of natural occurrences, did not let this pleasing circumstance escape him. He says, in his “ Summer,'’

“ A various group the herds and flocks compose:

- on the grassy bank

Some ruminating lay ; while others stand Half in the flood, and, often bending, sip The circling surface.”

Wolmer Pond, so called, I suppose, for eminence sake, is a vast lake for this part of the world, con¬ taining, in its whole circumference, 2,646 yards, or very near a mile and a half. The length of the north-west and opposite side is about 704 yards, and the breadth of the south-west end about 456 yards. This measurement, which I caused to be made with good exactness, gives an area of about sixty-six acres, exclusive of a large irregular arm at the north¬ east corner, which we did not take into the reck¬ oning.

On the face of this expanse of waters, and per¬ fectly secure from fowlers, lie all day long, in the winter season, vast flocks of ducks, teals, and wid¬ geons, of various denominations ; where they preen and solace and rest themselves, till towards sunset, when they issue forth in little parties (for in their natural state they are all birds of the night) to feed in the brooks and meadows ; returning again with the

dawn of the morning. Had this lake an arm or two

28

more, and were it planted round with thick covert (for now it is perfectly naked), it might make a valu¬ able decoy.

Yet neither its extent, nor the clearness of its water, nor the resort of various and curious fowls, nor its picturesque groups of cattle, can render this meer so remarkable as the great quantity of coins that were found in its bed about forty years ago.*

LETTER IX.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

By way of supplement, I shall trouble you once more on this subject, to inform you that Wolmer, with her sister forest Ayles Holt, alias Alice Holt,f

* The circumstances under which these coins were discovered are thus related in the author’s “Antiquities of Selborne : ” — “In the very dry summers of 1740 and 41, the bed of this lake became as dry and dusty as the surrounding heath ; and some of the forest cottagers, remem¬ bering stories of coins found by their fathers and grandfathers, began to search also, and with great success ; they found great heaps of coin, one lying on the other, as shot there out of a bag, many of them in good preservation. They consisted solely of Roman copper coin in hundreds, and some medals of the Lower Empire. The neighbouring gentry and clergy chose what they liked, and some dozens fell to the author, chiefly of Marcus Aurelius and the Empress Faustina. Those of Faustina were in high relief, exhibiting agreeable features, and the medals of a paler colour than the coins.”

f “ In Rot. Inquisit. de statu forest, in Scaccar. 36 Ed. 3, it is called Aisholt.” In “Tit. Wolmer and Aisholt Hantisc,” we are told “the Lord King had one chapel in his park at Kingesle.” “ Dominus Rex

29

as it is called in old records, is held by grant from the Crown for a term of years.

The grantees that the author remembers are Brigadier-General Emanuel Scroope Howe, and his lady, Ruperta, who was a natural daughter of Prince Rupert by Margaret Hughs ; a Mr. Mordaunt, of the Peterborough family, who married a dowager Lady Pembroke ; Henry Bilson Legge and lady ; and now Lord Stawel, their son.

The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced

J

age, long surviving her husband ; and, at her death, left behind her man}" curious pieces of mechanism of her father’s constructing, who was a distinguished mechanic and artist, as well as warrior ; and, among the rest, a very complicated clock, lately in posses¬ sion of Mr. Elmer, the celebrated game-painter at Earnham, in the county of Surrey.

Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow range of in closures, yet no two soils can be more different : for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, carrying a good turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to be large timber; while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, barren waste.

The former, being all in the parish of Binsted, is about two miles in extent from north to south, and

habet unam capellam in liaia sna de Kingesle.." “ Haia, sepes, sepimentum , parens; a Gall, haie and hayeP — Spelman’s Glossa?y , p. 272.

nearly as much from east to west ; and contains within it many woodlands and lawns, and the great lodge where the grantees reside ; and a smaller lodge called Goose-green ; and is abutted on by the* parishes of Kingsley, Frinsham, Farnham, and Bent¬ ley ; all of which have right of common.

One thing is remarkable, that though the Holt has been of old well stocked with fallow-deer, unre¬ strained by any pales or fences more than a common hedge, yet they were never seen within the limits of Wolmer ; nor were the red-deer of Wolmer ever known to haunt the thickets or glades of the Holt.

At present the deer of the Holt are much thinned and reduced by the night-hunters, who perpetually harass them in spite of the efforts of numerous keep¬ ers, and the severe penalties that have been put in force against them as often as they have been de¬ tected and rendered liable to the lash of the law. Neither fines nor imprisonments can deter them ; so impossible is it to extinguish the spirit of sporting, which seems to be inherent in human nature.

General Howe turned out some German wild boars and sows in his forests, to the great terror of the neighbourhood ; and, at one time, a wild bull or buffalo : but the country rose upon them and de¬ stroyed them.*

* German boars and sows were also turned out in the New Forest by Charles the First, which bred and increased : and their stock is supposed to exist still. — Mitford.

3i

A very large fall of timber, consisting of about one thousand oaks, has been cut this spring (viz., 1784) in the Holt forest ; one-fifth of which, it is said, belongs to the grantee, Lord Stawel. He lays claim also to the lop and top ; but the poor of the parishes of Binsted and Frinsham, Bentley and Kingsley, assert that it belongs to them ; and assembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away. One man, who keeps a team, has carried home, for his share, forty stacks of wood. Forty-five of these people his lordship has served with actions. These trees, which were very sound and in high perfection, were winter-cut, viz., in February and March, before the bark would run. In old times, the Holt was esti¬ mated to be eighteen miles, computed measure, from water carriage, -viz., from the town of Chertsey, on the Thames; but now it is not half that distance, since the Wey is made navigable up to the town of Godaiming, in the county of Surrey.

LETTER X.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbour whose studies have led him towards the pursuit of natural knowledge ; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my

attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from my childhood.

As to swallows ( Hirundines rustics) being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of

One of the old Selbome houses.

Wi ght, or any part of this country, 1 never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergy¬ man, of an inquisitive turn, assures me that, when he was a great boy, some workmen, in pulling down the battlements of a church tower early in the spring, found two or three swifts (. Hirundines apodes) among the rubbish, which seemed, at their first ap¬ pearance, dead ; but, on being carried towards the 5 33

fire, revived. He told me that, out of his great care to preserve them, he put them in a paper bag, and hung them by the kitchen fire, where they were suffocated.

Another intelligent person has informed me that, while he was a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great fragment of the chalk cliff fell down one stormy winter on the beach, and that many peo¬ ple found swallows among the rubbish ; but, on my questioning him whether he saw any of those birds himself, to my no small disappointment he answered me in the negative, but that others assured him they did.

Young broods of swallows began to appear this year on July the eleventh, and young martins {Hi- rundines urbicce) were then fledged in their nests. Both species will breed again once ; for I see by my fauna of last year, that young broods came forth so late as September the eighteenth. Are not these late hatchings more in favour of hiding than migra¬ tion ? Nay, some young martins remained in their nests last year so late as September the twenty- ninth ; and yet they totally disappeared with us by the fifth of October. How strange it is that the swift, which seems to live exactly the same life with the swallow and house-martin, should leave us before the middle of August invariably ! while the latter stay often till the middle of October; once I even

saw numbers of house-martins on the seventh of No-

34

vember. The martins, redwings, and fieldfares were flying in sight together ; an uncommon assemblage of summer and winter birds !

[It is not easy to discover whether White really believes in the hybernation of swallows or not ; he clings to the idea, and returns to it, although his own arguments seem to refute the notion almost as completely as those of any recent author. Writing twenty years later than the date of this letter, he tells us, in his Observations on Nature, March 23, 1788, that a gentleman who was this week on a visit at Waverly, took the opportunity of examining some of the holes in the sand-bank with which that district abounds. As these are undoubtedly bored by bank martins, and there they avowedly breed, he was in hopes that they might have slept there also, and that he might have surprised them just as they were waking from their winter slumbers. “ When we had dug for some time,” he says, “ we found the holes were horizontal and serpentine, as I had observed before ; and that the nests were deposited at the inner end, and had been occupied by broods in for¬ mer summers, but no torpid birds were to be found. The same search was made many years ago with as little success.” March 2, 1793, Mr. White adds, “ A single sand-martin was seen hovering and playing round the sandpit at Short-heath, where they abound in summer. April 9, 1793, a sober herd assures me

that this day he saw several on West Hanger com-

35

mon, between Hadleigh and Frensham, several sand- martins playing in and out and hanging before some nest-holes where the birds nestle.

“ This incident confirms my suspicions, that this species of hirundo is to be seen the first of any, and gives reason to suppose that they do not leave their wild haunts at all, but are secreted amidst the clefts and caverns of these abrupt cliffs. The late severe weather considered, it is not very probable that these birds should have migrated so early from a tropical region, through all these cutting winds and pinching frosts ; but it- is easy to suppose that they may, like bats and flies, have been awakened by the influence of the sun, amidst their secret latebrce where they have spent the uncomfortable foodless months in a torpid state, and in the profoundest slumbers.

“ There is a large pond at West Hanger which induces these sand-martins to frequent the district ; for I have ever remarked that they haunt near great waters, either rivers or lakes.”

A year later, he says, “ During the severe winds that often prevail late in the spring, it is not easy to say how the hirundines subsist : for they withdraw themselves, and are hardly ever seen, ncr do any in¬ sects appear for their support. That they can retire to rest and sleep away these uncomfortable periods as bats do, is a matter rather suspected than proved ;

or do they not rather spend their time in deep and

36

sheltered vales near waters where insects are to be found ? Certain it is that hardly any individuals have, at such times, been seen for days together.

“September 13, 1791, the congregating flocks of hirundines on the church and tower are both beauti¬ ful and amusing. When they fly off together from the roof on any alarm, they quite swarm in the air. But they soon settle again in heaps, and pulling their feathers and lifting up their wings to admit the sun, they seem to enjoy the warm situation. Thus they spend the heat of the day, preparing for their mi¬ gration, and, as it were, consulting when and where they are to go. The flight about the church seems to consist chiefly of house-martins, about 400 in num¬ ber ; but there are other places of rendezvous about the village frequented at the same time. It is re¬ markable that, though most of them sit on the battle¬ ments and roof, yet many of them hang or cling for some time by their claws against the surface of the walls in a manner not practised by them at other times of their remaining with us. The swallows seem to delight more in holding their assemblies on trees.

“November 3, 1789, the swallows were seen this morning, at Newton Vicarage house, hovering and settling on the roofs and outbuildings. None have been observed at Selborne since October 11. It is very remarkable that after the hirundines have disap¬ peared for some weeks, a few are occasionally seen

37

again ; sometimes in the first week of November, and that only for one day. Do they not withdraw and slumber in some hiding-place during the inter¬ val ? for we cannot suppose they had migrated to warmer climes, and returned again for one day. Is it not more probable that they are awakened from sleep, and like the bats are come forth to collect a little food ? These swallows looked like young ones."]

A little yellow bird (the Motacilla trochilus ) still continues to make a sibilous shivering noise in the tops of tall woods. The stoparola of Ray is called, in your Zoology, the fly-catcher. There is one cir¬ cumstance characteristic of this bird, which seems to have escaped observation, and that is, it takes its stand on the top of some stake or post, from whence it springs forth on its prey, catching a fly in the air, and hardly ever touching the ground, but returning still to the same stand for many times together.

I perceive there are more than one species of the Motacilla which visits us. Mr. Derham supposes, in Ray’s “ Philos. Letters," that he has discovered three. In these there is again an instance of some very common birds that have as yet no English name.

Mr. Stillingfleet makes a question whether the blackcap (. Motacilla atricapilld) be a bird of passage or not : I think there is no doubt of it : for, in April,

in the first fine weather, they come trooping, all at

33

once, into these parts, but are never seen in the win¬ ter. They are delicate songsters.

Numbers of snipes breed every summer in some moory ground on the verge of this parish. It is very amusing to see the cock bird on wing at that time, and to hear his pip¬ ing and hum¬ ming notes.

I have had

no opportunity yet of procuring any of those mice which I mentioned to you in town. The person that brought me the last says they are plentiful in harvest, at which time I will take care to get more ; and will endeavour to put it out of doubt whether it be a nondescript species or not.

I suspect much there may be two species of water-rats. Ray says, and Linnaeus after him, that the water-rat is web-footed behind. Now I have dis¬ covered a rat on the banks of our little stream that is not web-footed, and yet is an excellent swimmer and diver : it answers exactly to the Mus amphibius of Linnaeus, which, he says, swims and dives in ditches, “ natat in fossis et urinatur.” I should be

glad to procure “ one with the feet feathering out

39

A snipe.

like a palm," “ plantis palmatis ." Linnaeus seems to be in a puzzle about his Mus amphibius, and to doubt whether it differs from his Mus terrestris , which if it be, as he allows, the “ mus agrestis capite grandi brachyurus,” a field-mouse, with “ a large head and a short tail," is widely different from the water-rat, both in size, make, and manner of life.

As to the falco, which I . mentioned in town, I shall take the liberty to send it down to you into Wales ; presuming on your candour, that you will excuse me if it should appear as familiar to you as it is strange to me. “ Though mutilated, such as you would say it had formerly been, seeing that the re¬ mains are what they are," “ quale m dices . , . antehac fuisse, tales cum siut reliquice ! ”

It haunted a marshy piece of ground in quest of wild ducks and snipes ; but when it was shot, had just knocked down a rook, which it was tearing in pieces. I cannot make it answer to any of our Eng¬ lish hawks ; neither could I find any like it at the curious exhibition of stuffed birds in Spring Gar¬ dens. I found it nailed up at the end of a barn, which is the countryman’s museum.

The parish I live in is a very abrupt, uneven coun- trv, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds.

August 4, 1767.

jin severe weather, fieldfares, redwings, skylarks, and titlarks resort to watered meadows for food ; the

40

latter wades up to its belly in pursuit of the pupae of insects, and runs along upon the floating grass and weeds. Many gnats are on the snow near the water ; these support the birds in part.

Birds are much influenced in their choice of food by colour, for though white currants are a much sweeter fruit than red, yet they seldom touch the former till they have devoured every bunch of the latter.

Redstarts, fly-catchers, and blackcaps arrive early in April. If these little delicate beings are birds of passage, how could they, feeble as they seem, bear up against such storms of snow and rain, and make their way through such meteorous turbulences as one should suppose would embarrass and retard the most hardy and resolute of the winged nation ? Yet they keep their appointed times and seasons; and in spite of frosts and winds return to their stations periodically, as if they had met with nothing to obstruct them. The withdrawing and reappearing of the short - winged summer birds is a very puzzling circumstance in natural his¬ tory !

When the boys bring me wasps’ nests, my ban¬ tam fowls fare deliciously, and when the combs are pulled to pieces, devour the young wasps in their maggot state with the highest glee and delight. Any insect-eating bird would do the same. Birds of

prey occasionally feed on insects: thus have I seen

41

a tame kite picking up the female ants full of eggs with much satisfaction.] — Observations on Nature.

LETTER XL

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

It will not be without impatience that I shall wait for your thoughts with regard to the fcilco ; as to its weight, breadth, &c. I wish I had set them down at the time; but, to the best of my remem¬ brance, it weighed two pounds and eight ounces, and measured, from wing to wing, thirty-eight inches. Its cere and feet were yellow, and the circle of its eyelids a bright yellow. As it had been killed some days, and the eyes were sunk, I could make no good observation on the colour of the pupils and the iridesA

The most unusual birds I ever observed in these parts were a pair of Hoopoes ( iipupci ), which came several years ago in the summer, and frequented an ornamented piece of ground, which joins to my gar¬ den, for some weeks. They used to march about in a stately manner, feeding in the walks many times in the day, and seemed disposed to breed in my outlet; but were frighted and persecuted by idle boys, who would never let them be at rest.

* The irides are brown in all the British falcons.

42

Three grosbeaks (. Loxia coccothraustes ) appeared some years ago in my fields, in the winter ; one of which I shot ; since that, now and then, one is occa¬ sionally seen in the same dead season.

[Mr. B. shot a cock grosbeak which he had ob¬ served to haunt his garden for more than a fortnight. I began to accuse this bird of making sad havoc among the buds of the cherries, gooseberries, and wall-fruit of all the neighbouring orchards. Upon opening its crop or craw, however, no buds were to be seen, but a mass of kernels of the stones of fruits. Mr. B. ob¬ served that this bird frequented the spot where plum- trees grow; and that he had seen it with somewhat hard in its mouth, which it broke with difficulty ; these were the stones of damsons. The Latin orni¬ thologists call this bird coccothraustes , i. e., berry- breaker, because with its large horny beak it cracks and breaks the shells of stone-fruits for the sake of the seed or kernel. Birds of this sort are rarely seen in England, and only in winter.] — Observations on Nature.

A cross-bill ( Loxia curvirostra) was killed last year in this neighbourhood.

Our streams, which are small, and rise onlv at the end of the village, yield nothing but the bull’s head,* or miller’s thumb ( Gobius fluviatilis capita t us), the trout ( Trutta fluviatilis ), the eel ( anguilla ), the lam-

* Salmo fario. Linn. 43

pern ( Lampctra parva et fluviatilis), and the stickle¬ back ( Pisciculus aculeatus).

We are twenty miles from the sea, and almost as many from a great river, and therefore see but little of sea-birds. As to wild fowls, we have a few teams of ducks bred in the moors where the snipes breed ; and multitudes of widgeons and teals fre¬ quent our lakes in the forest in hard weather.

Having some acquaintance with a tame brown owl, I find that it casts up the fur of mice and the feathers of birds in pellets, after the manner of hawks : when full, like a dog, it hides what it can¬ not eat.

The young of the barn owl are not easily raised, as they want a constant supply of fresh mice : where¬ as the young of the brown owl will eat indiscrim¬ inately all that is brought ; snails, rats, kittens, pup¬ pies, magpies, and any kind of carrion or offal.

The house-martins have eggs still, and squab- young. The last swift I observed was about the twenty-first of August ; it was a straggler.

Redstarts, fly-catchers, white-throats, and gold- crested wrens, reguli non cristati, still appear ; but I have seen no blackcaps lately.

I forsrot to mention that I once saw, in Christ Church college quadrangle in Oxford, on a very sunny, warm morning, a house-martin flying about, and settling on the parapet, so late as the twentieth of November.

44

At present I know only two species of bats, the common Vespertilio murinus and the Vespertilio au- ritus.

I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which would take flies out of a person’s hand. If you gave it anything to eat, it brought its wings round before the mouth, hovering and hiding its head in the manner of birds of prey when they feed. The adroitness it showed in shearing off the wings of flies, which were always rejected, was worthy of ob¬ servation, and pleased me much. Insects seemed to be most acceptable, though it did not refuse raw flesh when offered : so that the notion that bats go down chimneys and gnaw men’s bacon seems no im¬ probable story. While I amused myself with this wonderful quadruped, I saw it several times confute the vulgar opinion, that bats when down on a flat sur¬ face cannot get on the wing again, by rising with great ease from the floor. It ran, I observed, with more despatch than I was aware of ; but in a most ridiculous and grotesque manner.

Bats drink on the wing, like swallows, by sipping the surface, as they play over pools and streams. They love to frequent waters, not only for the sake of drinking, but on account of the insects which are found over them in the greatest plenty. As I was going, some years ago, pretty late, in a boat from Richmond to Sunbury, on a warm summer’s evening,

I think I saw myriads of bats between the two

45

places : the air swarmed with them all along the Thames, so that hundreds were in sight at a time.

Selborne, Sept. 9, 1767.

LETTER XII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

It gave me no small satisfaction to hear that the falco turned out an uncommon one. I must confess I should have been better pleased to have heard that I had sent you a bird that you had never seen be¬ fore ; but that I find would be a difficult task.

I have procured some of the mice mentioned in my former letters, a young one and a female with young, both of which I have preserved in brandy. From the colour, shape, size, and manner of nesting, I make no doubt but that the species is nondescript. They are much smaller, and more slender, than the Mus domesticiis niedius of Ray ; and have more of the squirrel or dormouse colour : their belly is white ; a straight line along their sides divides the shades of their back and belly. They never enter into houses; are carried into ricks and barns with the sheaves ; abound in harvest ; and build their nests amidst the straws of the corn above the ground, and sometimes in thistles. They breed as many7 as eight at a litter, in a little round nest, composed of the blades of grass or wheat.

46

One of these nests I procured this autumn, most artificially platted, and composed of the blades of wheat ; perfectly round, and about the size of a cricket-ball ; with the aperture so ingeniously closed, that there was no discovering to what part it be¬ longed. It was so compact and well filled, that it would roll across the table without being discom¬ posed, though it contained eight little mice that were naked and blind. As this nest was perfectly full, how could the dam come at her litter respectively, so as to administer a teat to each ? Perhaps she opens different places for that purpose, adjusting them again when the business is over ; but she could not possibly be contained herself in the ball with her young, which, moreover, would be daily in¬ creasing in bulk. This wonderful procreant cra¬ dle, and elegant instance of the efforts of instinct, was found in a wheatfield, suspended in the head of a thistle.

A gentleman curious in birds wrote me word that his servant had shot one last January, in that severe weather, which he believed would puzzle me. I called to see it this summer, not knowing what to ex¬ pect : but the moment I took it in hand, I pronounced it the male Garrulus Bohemicus , or German silk-tail, from the five peculiar crimson tags or points which it carries at the ends of five of the short remiges. It cannot, I suppose, with any propriety be called an’

English bird : and yet I see, by Ray’s “ Philosophi-

47

cal Letters,” that great flocks of them appeared in this kingdom in the winter of 1685, feeding on haws.

The mention of haws puts me in mind that there is a total failure of that wild fruit, so conducive to the support of many of the winged nation. For the same severe weather, late in the spring, which cut off

all the produce of the more tender and curious trees, destroyed also that of the more hardy and common.

Some birds, haunting with the missel-thrushes, and feeding on the ber¬ ries of'the yew-tree, which answered to the description of the Merula torquata, or ring-ouzel, were lately seen in this neighbourhood. I employed some people to procure me a specimen, but without success.

Query. — Might not Canary-birds be naturalized to this climate, provided their eggs were put, in the spring, into the nests of some of their congeners, as goldfinches, greenfinches, <kc. ? Before winter per-

48

haps they might be hardened, and able to shift for themselves.

About ten years ago 1 used to spend some weeks yearly at Sunbury, which is one of those pleasant villages lying on the Thames, near Hampton Court. In the autumn, I could not help being much amused with those myriads of the swallow kind which as¬ semble in those parts. But what struck me most was, that, from the time they began to congregate, forsaking- the chimneys and houses, they roosted every night in the osier-beds of the aits of that river. Now this resorting towards that element, at that sea¬ son of the year, seems to give some countenance to the northern opinion (strange as it is) of their retiring under water. A Swedish naturalist is so much per¬ suaded of that fact, that he talks, in his “ Calendar of Flora,” as familiarly of the swallow’s going under water in the beginning of September, as he would of his poultry going to roost a little before sunset.

An observing gentleman in London writes me word that he saw a house-martin, on the twenty- third of last October, flying in and out of its nest in the Borough : and I myself, on the twenty-ninth of last October (as I was travelling through Oxford), saw four or five swallows hovering round and set¬ tling on the roof of the county hospital.

Now, is it likely that these poor little birds (which perhaps had not been hatched but a few

weeks) should, at that late season of the year, and 6 49

from so midland a county, attempt a voyage to Goree or Senegal, almost as far as the equator ? I acquiesce entirely in your opinion — that, though most of the swallow kind may migrate, yet that some do stay behind, and hide with us during1 the winter.

As to the short- winged soft-billed birds which come trooping in such numbers in the spring, I am at a loss even what to think about them. I watched them narrowly this year, and saw them abound till about Michaelmas, when they appeared no longer. Subsist they cannot openly among us and yet elude the eyes of the inquisitive: and, as to their hiding, no man pretends to have found any of them in a tor¬ pid state in winter. But with regard to their migra¬ tion, what difficulties attend that supposition : that such feeble bad fliers (who the summer long never flit but from hedge to hedge) should be able to traverse vast seas and continents, in order to enjoy milder seasons amidst the regions of Africa !

November 4, 1767.

LETTER XIII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

As in one of your former letters you expressed the more satisfaction from my correspondence on account of my living in the most southerly county ; so now I may return the compliment, and expect to

have my curiosity gratified by your living much more to the north.

For many years past I have observed that towards Christmas vast flocks of chaffinches have appeared in the fields ; many more, I used to think, than could be hatched in any one neighbourhood. But, when I came to observe them more narrowly, I was amazed to find that they seemed to me to be almost all hens. I communicated my suspicions to some intelligent neighbours, who, after taking pains about the matter, declared that they also thought them mostly all females; at least fifty to one. This extraordinary occurrence brought to my mind the remark of Linnaeus, that “ before winter all their hen chaffinches migrate through Holland into Italy.” Now I want to know, from some curious person in the north, whether there are any large flocks of these finches with them in the winter, and of which sex they mostly consist? For, from such intelligence, one might be able to judge whether our female flocks migrate from the other end of the island, or whether they come over to us from the Continent.

We have, in the winter, vast flocks of the com¬ mon linnets ; more, I think, than can be bred in any one district. These, I observe, when the spring ad¬ vances, assemble on some tree in the sunshine, and join all in a gentle sort of chirping,, as if they were about to break up their winter quarters and betake

themselves to their proper summer homes. It is

51

well known, at least, that this is the signal of depar¬ ture with the swallows and the fieldfares, which con¬ gregate with a gentle twittering before they take their respective departure.

You may depend on it that the bunting ( Emberiza miliaria) does not leave this country in the winter. In January, 1767, I saw several dozen of them, in the midst of a severe frost, among the bushes on the downs near Andover: in our woodland inclosed dis¬ trict it is a rare bird.

W agtails, both white and yellow, are with us all the winter. Quails crowd to our southern coast, and are often killed in numbers by people that go on purpose.

Mr. Stillingfleet, in his Tracts, says that “if the wheatear ( cenanthe ) does not quit England, it certainlv shifts places ; for about harvest they are not to be found, where there was before great plenty of them." This well accounts for the vast quantities that are caught about that time on the south downs near Lewes, where they are esteemed a delicacy. There have been shepherds, I have been crediblv informed, that have made many pounds in a season by catching them in traps. And though such multitudes are taken, I never saw (and I am well acquainted with those parts') above two or three at a time : for they are never gregarious. Thev mav perhaps migrate in general ; and, for that purpose, draw towards the coast of Sussex in autumn : but that they do not all

withdraw I am sure : because I see a few stragglers in many counties, at all times of the year, especially about warrens and stone-quarries.

I have no acquaintance, at present, among the gentlemen of the navy : but have written to a friend, who was a sea-chaplain in the late war, desiring him to look into his minutes, with respect to birds that settled on their rigging during their voyage up or down the Channel. What Hasselquist says on that subject is remarkable : there were little short-winged birds frequently coming on board his ship all the way from our Channel quite up to the Levant, espe¬ cially before squally weather.

What you suggest with regard to Spain is highly probable. The winters of Andalusia are so mild, that, in all likelihood, the soft-billed birds that leave us at that season, may find insects sufficient to support them there.

Some young men, possessed of fortune, health, and leisure, should make an autumnal voyage into that kingdom ; and should spend a year there, in¬ vestigating the natural history of that vast country. Mr. Willughby passed through that kingdom on such an errand ; but he seems to have skirted along in a superficial manner and an ill-humour, being much disgusted at the rude dissolute manners of the people.

I have no friend left now at Sunbury to apply

to about the swallows roosting on the aits of the

53

Thames : nor can I hear any more about those birds which I suspected were Memlce torquatce.

As to the small mice, I have further to remark, that though they hang their nests for breeding up amidst the straws of the standing corn, above the

A corn-rick in Norton farmyard.

ground ; yet I find that, in the winter, they burrow deep in the earth, and make warm beds of grass : but their grand rendezvous seems to be in corn-ricks, into which they are carried at harvest. A neighbour housed an oat-rick lately, under the thatch of which were assembled near an hundred, most of which were

taken ; and some I saw. I measured them, and found

54

that from nose to tail, they were just two inches and a quarter, and their tails just two inches long. Two of them, in a scale, weighed down just one copper halfpenny, which is about the third of an ounce avoir¬ dupois : so that I suppose they are the smallest quad¬ rupeds in this island. A full grown Mus medius do- mesticus weighs, I find, one ounce lumping weight, which is more than six times as much as the mouse above ; and measures from nose to rump four inches and a quarter, and the same in its tail. We have had a very severe frost and deep snow this month. My thermometer was one day fourteen degrees and a half below the freezing point, within doors. The tender evergreens were injured pretty much. It was very providential that the air was still, and the ground well covered with snow, else vegetation in general must have suffered prodigiously. There is reason to believe that some days were more severe than any since the year 1739-40.

Selborne, Jan. 22, 1768.

LETTER XIV.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

If some curious gentleman would procure the head of a fallow deer, and have it dissected, he

would find it furnished with two spiracula, or

55

breathing-places, besides the nostrils ; probably anal¬ ogous to the puncta lachrymalia in the human head. When deer are thirsty they plunge their noses, like some horses, very deep under water while in the act of drinking, and continue them in that situation for a considerable time : but to obviate any inconveniency, they can open two vents, one at the inner corner of each eye, having a communication with the nose. Here seems to be an extraordinary provision of nature worthy our attention ; and which has not, that I know of, been noticed by any naturalist. For it looks as if these creatures would not be suffocated though both their mouths and nostrils were stopped. This curious formation of the head may be of singu¬ lar service to beasts of chase, by affording them free respiration: and no doubt these additional nostrils are thrown open when they are hard run.* Mr. Ray observed that at Malta the owners slit up the nostrils of such asses as were hard worked : for they being naturally strait or small, did not admit air sufficient to serve them when they travelled, or laboured, in that hot climate. And we know that grooms, and gentlemen of the turf, think large nostrils necessary, and a perfection in hunters and running horses.

* In answer to this account. Mr. Pennant sent me the following curi¬ ous and pertinent reply : — “ I was much surprised to find in the antelope something analogous to what you mention as so remarkable in deer. This animal also has a long slit beneath each eye, which can be opened and shut at pleasure. On holding an orange to one, the creature made as

56

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

“ T eTpadvjuoi 'p?ves, irlavpes TTVOiitai hiavXoi."

“ Quadrifidae nares, quadruplices ad respirationem canales.”

Opp. Cyn. Lib. ii. 1. 181.

(“ Nostrils split in four divisions, fourfold passages for breathing.”)

Writers, copying from one another, make Aris¬ totle say that goats breathe at their ears ; whereas he asserts just the contrary: “’A Xic/iaLwv yap ovk dXrjdrj \eyei, (frapuevos dvdnrveiv Ta? alyas Kara ra <hra.

“Alcmseon does not advance what is true, when he avers that goats breathe through their ears.” — His¬ tory of Animals, Book i, ch. xi.

Selborne, March 12, 1768.

LETTER XV.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

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 pole¬ cat ; a little reddish beast, not much bigger than a

much use of those orifices as of his nostrils, applying them to the fruit, and seeming to smell it through them.” — White.

57

field mouse, but much longer, which they call a cane. This piece of intelligence can be little depended on ; but further 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 unable 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.

[Rooks are con¬ tinually fighting and pulling each other’s nests to pieces : these proceedings are inconsistent with living in such close community. And yet if a pair offer to build on a single tree, the nest is plundered and demol¬ ished at once. Some rooks roost on their nest trees. The twigs which the rooks drop in build¬ ing supply the poor with brushwood to light their fires. Some unhappy pairs are not permitted to finish any nest till the rest have completed their

building. As soon as they get a few sticks together,

*53

A white rook.

a party comes and demolishes the whole. As soon as rooks have finished their nests, and before they lay, the cocks begin to feed the hens, who receive their bounty with a fondling tremulous voice and fluttering wings, and all the little blandishments that are expressed by the young while in a helpless state. This gallant deportment of the males is con¬ tinued through the whole season of incubation. These birds do not copulate on trees, nor in their nests, but on the ground in the open fields.] *

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.

J

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 be^an 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

* After the first brood of rooks are sufficiently fledged, thev all resort to some distant place in search of food, but return regularly every even¬ ing, in vast flights, to their nest trees, where, after flying round with much noise and clamour, till they are all assembled together, they take up their abode for the night. — Markwick.

59

cuckoo-pint ( arturi ) was frequently scratched out of the dry banks of hedges, and eaten in severe snowy weather. After observing, with some exactness, my¬ self, and getting others to do the same, we found it was the thrush kind that searched it out. The root of the arum is remarkably warm and pungent.

Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken us. The blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down bv that fierce weather in Jan- uary.

In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, a little bird that raised my curiosity ; it was of that yellow-green colour that belongs to the salicaria kind, and I think was soft-billed. It was no paras ; and was too long and too big for the golden- crowned wren, appearing most like the largest wil¬ low-wren. It hung sometimes with its back down¬ wards, but never continuing one moment in the same place. I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed my aim.

I wonder that the stone-curlew, Charadrius oedic- nemus , should be mentioned by writers as a rare bird : it abounds in all the campaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the summer, hav¬ ing young ones, I know, very late in the autumn. Already they begin clamouring in the evening. They cannot. I think, with any propriety be called, as they are by Mr. Ray, dwellers about streams or

ponds, circa aquas ver sautes ; for with us, by day at

60

least, they haunt only the most dry, open, upland fields and sheep-walks, far removed from water ; what they may do in the night I cannot say. Worms are their usual food, but they also eat toads and frogs.

I can show you some good specimens of my new mice. Linnaeus, perhaps, would call the species Mus minimus.

LETTER XVI.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

The history of the stone-curlew, Charadrius oedic- nemus, is as follows. It lays its eggs, usually two, never more than three, on the bare ground, without any nest, in the field ; so that the countryman, in stirring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run immediately from the egg like partridges, <&c., and are withdrawn to some flinty field by the dam, where they skulk among the stones, which are their best security; for their feathers are so exactly of the colour of our grey-spotted flints, that the most exact observer, unless he catches the eye of the young bird, may be eluded. The eggs are short and round ; of a dirty white, spotted with dark bloody blotches. Though I might not be able, just when I pleased, to procure you a bird, yet I could show you them al¬ most any day ; and any evening you may hear them

round the village, for they make a clamour which

61

may be heard a mile. Oedicnemus is a most apt and expressive name for them, since their legs seem swollen like those of a gouty man. After harvest I have shot them before the pointers in turnip-fields.

I make no doubt but there are three species of the willow-wrens ; two I know perfectly : but have not been able yet to procure the third. No two birds can differ more in their notes, and that con¬ stantly, than those two that I am acquainted with ; for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note ; the other a harsh loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and three-quarters of an inch longer, and weighs two drams and a half, while the latter weighs but two ; so the songster is one-fifth heavier than the chirper. The chirper (being the first summer bird of passage that is heard, the wryneck sometimes excepted) begins his two notes in the middle of March, and con¬ tinues them through the spring and summer till the end of August, as appears by my journals. The legs of the larger of these two are flesh-coloured ; of the less, black.

The grasshopper-lark began his sibilous note in my fields last Saturday. Nothing can be more amusing than the whisper of this little bird, which seems to be close by though at a hundred yards dis¬ tance ; and when close at your ear is scarce any louder than when a great way off. Had I not been a little acquainted with insects, and known that the

grasshopper kind is not vet hatched, I should have

62

hardly believed but that it had been a locusta whis¬ pering in the bushes. The country people laugh when you tell them

that it is the note of a bird. It is a most artful crea¬ ture, skulking in the thickest part of a bush : and will sing at a yard distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to get a person to go on the other side of the hedge where

A bird's nest found.

it haunted : and then it would run, creeping like a mouse, before us for a hundred yards together, through the bottom of the thorns ; yet it would not come into fair sight: but in a morning early, and when undisturbed, it sings on the top of a twig, gap¬ ing and shivering with its wings. Mr. Ray himself had no knowledge of this bird, but received his ac¬ count from Mr. Johnson, who apparently confounds it with the Regnli non cristati, from which it is very distinct.

The fly-catcher ( Stoparola , Ray) has not yet ap¬ peared ; it usually breeds in my vine. The redstart begins to sing : its note is short and imperfect, but is

continued till about the middle of June. The willow- wrens (the smaller sort) are horrid pests in a garden, destroying the peas, cherries, and currants, and are so tame that a gun will not scare them.*

My countrymen talk much of a bird that makes a clatter with its bill against a dead bough, or some old pales, calling it a jar-bird. I procured one to be shot in the very fact; it proved to be the nuthatch, ( Sit fa Europcea). Mr. Ray says that the less spotted woodpecker does the same. This noise may be heard a furlong or more off.

Now is the only time to ascertain the short¬ winged summer birds; for when the leaf is out there

* A list of the Summer Birds of Passage discovered in this neighbour¬ hood ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear : —

LINNJEI NOMINA.

Smallest willow-wren,

Wryneck,

House-swallow,

Martin,

Sand-martin,

Cuckoo,

Nightingale,

Blackcap,

Whitethroat,

Middle willow-wren, Swift,

Stone curlew, ? Turtle-dove, ? Grasshopper-lark, Landrail,

Largest willow-wren, Redstart,

Goatsucker, or fern-owl, Fly-catcher,

Motacilla trochilus . Junx torquilla.

Hirundo rustica. Chelidon urbica.

Cotile rip aria.

Cuculus canorus.

Lusinia philomela. Motacilla atricapilla. Motacilla sylvia. Motacilla trochilus. Hirundo apus. Charadrius oedicnem us. ? Turtur ahhovandi. ? Alauda trivialis.

Rallus crex.

Motacilla trochilus. Ruticilla phomicura. Capri?)i ulgus Etiropcea. Muscicapa grisola.

64

is no making any remarks on such a restless tribe : and when once the young begin to appear it is all confusion : there is no distinction of genus, species or sex.

In breeding-times snipes play over the moors, piping and humming: they always hum as they are descending. Is not their hum ventriloquous, like that of the turkey? Some suspect it is made by their wings.

This morning I saw the golden-crowned wren, whose crown glitters like burnished gold. It often hangs like a titmouse, with its back downwards.

Selborne, April iS, 1768.

LETTER XVII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

Ox Wednesday last arrived your agreeable letter of June the 10th. It gives me great satisfaction to find that you pursue these studies still with such vigour, and are in such forwardness with regard to reptiles and fishes.

The reptiles, few as they are, I am not ac¬ quainted with so well as I could wish, with regard to their natural history. There is a degree of du¬ biousness and obscurity attending the propagation of this class of animals, something analogous to that

7 65

of the cryptogaraia in the sexual system of plants : and the case is the same with regard to some of the fishes ; as the eel, &c.

The method in which toads procreate and bring forth seems to be very much in the dark. Some authors say that they are viviparous : and yet Ray classes them among his oviparous animals ; and is silent with regard to the manner of their bringing forth. Perhaps they may be ecrw fj,ev wotokol, e^co Se £wot6kol, as is known to be the case with the viper. That of frogs is notorious to everybody : because we see them sticking upon each other’s backs for a month together in the spring : and yet I never saw or read of toads being observed in the same situa¬ tion. It is strange that the matter with regard to the venom of toads has not yet been settled. That they are not noxious to some animals is plain : for ducks, buzzards, owls, stone-curlews, and snakes eat them, to my knowledge, with impunity. And I well remember the time, but was not eye-witness to the fact (though numbers of persons were) when a quack at this village ate a toad to make the country- people stare ; afterwards he drank oil.

I have been informed also, from undoubted au¬ thority, that some ladies (ladies you will say of peculiar taste) took a fancy to a toad, which they nourished summer after summer, for many years, with the maggots which turn to flesh flies, till he

grew to a monstrous size. The reptile used to come

66

forth every evening from a hole under the garden steps ; and was taken up on the table to be fed after supper. But at last a tame raven, kenning him as he put forth his head, gave him such a severe stroke with his horny beak as put out one eye. Alter this ac¬ cident the creature languished for some time and died.

I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive reading of the excellent account there is from Mr. Derham, in Ray’s “ Wisdom of God in the Crea¬ tion,” concerning the migration of frogs from their breeding ponds. In this account he at once sub¬ verts that foolish opinion of their dropping from the clouds in rain ; showing that it is from the grateful coolness and moisture of those showers that they are tempted to set out on their travels, which they de¬ fer till those fall. Frogs are as yet in their tadpole state ; but in a few weeks our lanes, paths, fields, will swarm for a few days with mvriads of those emigrants, no larger than my little finger nail. Swammerdam gives a most accurate account of the method and situation in which the male impregnates the spawn of the female. How wonderful is the economy of Providence with regard to the limbs of so vile a reptile ! While it is an aquatic, or in a tadpole state, it has a fish-like tail, and no legs : as soon as the legs sprout, the tail drops off as useless, and the animal betakes itself to the land.*

* The tail of the tadpole does not drop off ; it is absorbed.

67

Merrit, I trust, is widely mistaken when he ad¬ vances that the Rana arborea is an English reptile ; it abounds in Germany and Switzerland.

It is to be remembered that the Salamandra aqua- tica of Ray (the water-newt, or eft) will frequently bite at the angler's bait, and is often caught on his hook. I used to take it for granted that the Sala¬ mandra aquatica was hatched, lived, and died, in the water. But John Ellis, Esq., F. R. S. (the coralline Ellis), asserts, in a letter to the Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, in his account of the Mud inguana , an amphibious bipes from South Carolina, that the water-eft, or newt, is only the larva of the land-eft, as tadpoles are of frogs. Lest I should be suspected of misunderstanding his meaning, I shall give it in his own words. Speaking of the opercula or cover¬ ings to the gills of the Mud inguana , he proceeds to say that “ the form of these pennated coverings ap¬ proaches very near to what I have some time ago observed in the larva or aquatic state of our English Lacerta , known by the name of eft or newt : which serve them for coverings to their gills, and for fins to swim with while in this state ; and which they lose, as well as the fins of their tails, when they change their state and become land animals, as I have observed, by keeping them alive for some time myself.”

Linnaeus, in his “ Systema Naturae,” hints more

than once at what Mr. Ellis advances.

6S

Providence has been so indulgent to us as to allow of but one venomous reptile of the serpent kind in these kingdoms, and that is the viper. As you propose the good of mankind to be an object of your publications, you will not omit to mention common salad-oil as a sovereign remedy against the bite of the viper. As to the blind worm (Angitis fragilis, so called because it snaps in sunder with a small blow), I have found on examination that it is perfectly innocuous. A neighbouring yeoman (to whom I am indebted for some good hints) killed and opened a female viper about the 27th of May ; he found her filled with a chain of eleven eggs, about the size of those of a blackbird ; but none of them were advanced so far towards a state of matu¬ rity as to contain any rudiments of young. Though they are oviparous, yet they are viviparous also, hatching their young within their bellies, and then bringing them forth. Whereas snakes lay chains of eggs every summer in my melon-beds, in spite of all that my people can do to prevent them ; which eggs do not hatch till the spring following, as I have often experienced. Several intelligent folks assure me that they have seen the viper open her mouth and admit her helpless young down her throat on sudden surprises, just as the female opossum does her brood into the pouch under her belly, upon the like emergencies ; and yet the London viper-catchers insist on it, to Mr. Barrington, that no such thing

69

ever happens. The serpent kind eat, I believe, but once in a year ; or, rather, but only just at one sea¬ son of the year. Country people talk much of a water-snake, but, I am pretty sure, without any reason ; for the common snake i Coluber natrix) de¬ lights much to sport in the water, perhaps with a view to procure frogs and other food.

I cannot well guess how you are to make out your twelve species of reptiles, unless it be the va¬ rious species, or rather varieties, of our Laccrti, of which Ray enumerates five. 1 have not had oppor¬ tunity of ascertaining these ; but remember well to have seen, formerly, several beautiful green Lacerti on the sunny sandbanks near Farnham, in Surrey ; and Ray admits there are such in Ireland.

Selborne, June iS, 176S.

LETTER XVIII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

I received your obliging and communicative letter of June the 28th, while I was on a visit at a gentleman’s house, where I had neither books to turn to nor leisure to sit down to return you an answer to many queries, which I wanted to resolve in the best manner that I am able.

A person, by my order, has searched our brooks,

70

but could find no such fish as the Gasterosteus pun- gitins : he found the Gasterosteus aciileatus in plen¬ ty. This morning, in a basket, I packed a little

The butcher's shop.

earthen pot full of wet moss, and in it some stick¬ lebacks, male and female ; the females big with spawn : some lamperns ; some bullheads ; but I could procure no minnows. This basket will be

in Fleet Street by eight this evening ; so I hope

71

Mazel * will have them fresh and fair to-morrow morning. I gave some directions in a letter to what particulars the engraver should be attentive.

Finding, while I was on a visit, that I was within a reasonable distance of Ambresburv, I sent a serv¬ ant over to that town, and procured several living specimens of loaches, which he brought, safe and brisk, in a glass decanter. Thev were taken in the gullies that were cut for watering the meadows. From these fishes ( which measured from two to four inches in length ) I took the following description : — “ The loach, in its general aspect, has a pellucid appearance ; its back is mottled with irregular col¬ lections of small black dots, not reaching much be¬ low the linea lateralis , as are the back and tail fins : a black line runs from each eve down to the nose ; its belly is of a silvery white ; the upper jaw projects beyond the lower, and is surrounded with six feel¬ ers, three on each side ; its pectoral fins are large, its ventral much smaller ; the fin behind its anus small ; its dorsal fin large, containing eight spines ; its tail, where it joins to the tail-fin, remarkably broad, without any taperness, so as to be characteris¬ tic of this genus : the tail-fin is broad, and square at the end. From the breadth and muscular strength of the tail it appears to be an active nimble fish.”

In my visit I was not very far from Hungerford,

* Mr. Peter Mazel was the engraver of Pennant's plates.

and did not forget to make some inquiries concern¬ ing the wonderful method of curing cancers by means of toads. Several intelligent persons, both gentry and clergy, do, I find, give a great deal of credit to what was asserted in the papers ; and I myself dined with a clergyman who seemed to be persuaded that what is related is matter of fact ; but when I came to attend to his account, I thought I discerned circumstances which did not a little in¬ validate the woman’s story of the manner in which she came by her skill. She says of herself : “ that labouring under a virulent cancer, she went to some church where there was a vast crowd : on going into a pew, she was accosted by a strange clergy¬ man ; who, after expressing compassion for her situation, told her that if she would make such an application of living toads as is mentioned she would be well.” Now is it likely that this unknown gentleman should express so much tenderness for this single sufferer, and not feel any for the many thousands that daily languish under this terrible disorder? Would he not have made use of this invaluable nostrum for his own emolument ; or, at least, by some means of publication or other, have found a method of making it public for the good of mankind ? In short, this woman (as it appears to to me) having set up for a cancer-doctress, finds it expedient to amuse the country with this dark and mysterious relation.

73

The water-eft has not, that I can discern, the least appearance of any gills ; for want of which it is continually rising to the surface of the water to take in fresh air. I opened a big-bellied one indeed, and found it full of spawn. Xot that this circumstance at all invalidates the assertion that they are larvas ; for the larvae of insects are full of eggs, which they exclude the instant they enter their last state. The water-eit is continually climbing over the brims of the vessel within which we keep it in water, and wandering away ; and people every summer see numbers crawling out of the pools where they are hatched, up the dry banks. There are varieties of them, differing in colour ; and some have fins up their tail and back, and some have not.

Selborxe, July 27, 176S.

LETTER XIX.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

I have now, past dispute, made out three dis¬ tinct species of the willow-wrens (. Motacillcz trochili) which constantly and invariably use distinct notes; but, at the same time, I am obliged to confess that I know nothing of your willow-lark.* In my letter of

* Brit. Zool., edit. 1776, octavo, p. 381.

April the 1 8th, I had told you peremptorily that I knew your willow-lark, but had not seen it then : but when I came to procure it, it proved, in all respects, a very Motacilla trochilus ;* only that it is a size larger than the other two, and the yellow-green of the whole upper part of the body is more vivid, and the belly of a clearer white. I have specimens of three sorts now lying before me, and can discern that there are three gradations of sizes, and that the least has black legs, and the other two flesh-col¬ oured ones. The yellowest bird is considerably the largest, and has its quill feathers and secondary feathers tipped with white, which the others have not. This last haunts only the tops of trees in high beechen woods, and makes a sibilous grasshopper¬ like noise, now and then, at short intervals, shivering a little with its wings when it sings ; and is, I make no doubt now, the Regulus non crist at us of Ray ; which he says “ cantat voce stridula locustse.” Yet this great ornithologist never suspected that there were three species.

Selborne, Aug. 17, 1768.

* Hedge-warbler (see Letter XXVI.) : Sylvia loquax , black legs; Svlvia trochilus, yellowish belly ; Sylvia sibilatrix , white belly.

75

LETTER XX.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany : all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined. Sev¬ eral birds, which are said to belong to the north only, are, it seems, often in the south. I have dis¬ covered this summer three species of birds with us, which writers mention as only to be seen in the northern counties. The first that was brought me (on the 14th of May) was the sandpiper ( Tringa hypoleucus ) : it was a cock bird, and haunted the banks of some ponds near the village ; and as it had a companion, doubtless intended to have bred near that water. Besides, the owner has told me since, that, on recollection, he has seen some of the same birds round his ponds in former summers.

The next bird that I procured (on the 21st of May) was a male red-back butcher bird (. Lanins col- lurio). My neighbour who shot it says that it might easily have escaped his notice, had not the outcries and chattering of the white-throats and other small birds drawn his attention to the bush where it was : its craw was filled with legs and wings of beetles.

The next rare birds (which were procured for me last week) were some ring-ousels ( Tardus torquatus).

This week twelve months a gentleman from Lon-

76

don being with us, was amusing himself with a gun, and found, he told us, on an old yew hedge where

A friendly chat on Selborne street.

there were berries, some birds like blackbirds, with rings of white round their necks: a neighbouring farmer also at the same time observed the same ; but, as no specimens were procured, little notice was

taken. I mentioned this circumstance to you in my

77

letter of November the 4th, 1767. Last week the aforesaid farmer, seeing a large flock, twenty or thirty, of these birds, shot two cocks and two hens : and says, on recollection, that he remembers to have observed these birds last spring, about Lady-day, as it were, on their return to the north. If these birds should prove the ousels of the north of England, then here is a migration disclosed within our own king¬ dom never before remarked. It does not yet appear whether they retire beyond the bounds of our island to the south ; but it is most probable that they usu¬ ally do, or else one cannot suppose that they would have continued so long unnoticed in the southern counties. The ousel is larger than a blackbird, and feeds on haws ; but last autumn (when there were no haws) it fed on yew-berries ; in the spring it feeds on ivy-berries, which ripen only at that season, in March and April.

I must not omit to tell you (as you have been lately on the stud}7 of reptiles) that my people, every now and then of late, draw up with a bucket of water from my well, which is 63 feet deep, a large black warty lizard, with a fin-tail and yellow bellv. How they first came down at that depth, and how they were ever to have got out thence without help, is more than I am able to say.

My thanks are due to you for your trouble and

care in the examination of a buck’s head. As far as

your discoveries reach at present, they seem much

73

to corroborate my suspicions ; and I hope Mr. Hunt may find reason to give his decision in my favour ; and then, I think, we may advance this extraordinary provision of nature as a new instance of the wisdom of God in the creation.

As yet I have not quite done with my history of the oedicnemus, or stone-curlew ; for I shall desire a gentleman in Sussex (near whose house these birds congregate in vast flocks in the autumn) to observe nicely when they leave him (if they do leave him), and when they return again in the spring : I was with this gentleman lately, and saw several single birds.

Selborne, Oct. 8, 1768.

LETTER XXI.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

With regard to the oedicnemus , or stone-curlew, I intend to write very soon to my friend near Chiches¬ ter, in whose neighbourhood these birds seem most to abound ; and shall urge him to take particular notice when they begin to congregate, and after¬ wards to watch them most narrowly, whether they do not withdraw themselves during the dead of the winter. When I have obtained information with

respect to this circumstance, I shall have finished

79

my history of the stone-curlew ; which I hope will prove to your satisfaction, as it will be, I trust, very near the truth.

It is very extraordinary, as you observe, that a bird so common with us should never straggle to you.

After a lapse of twenty years, Mr. White adds : [On the 27th of February, 1788, stone-curlews were heard to pipe; and on March 1st, after it was dark, some were passing over the village, as might be per¬ ceived from their quick short note, which the}' use in their nocturnal excursions by way of watchword, that they may not stray and lose their companions.

Thus, we see, that retire whithersoever they may in the winter, they return again early in the spring, and are, as it now appears, the first summer birds that come back. Perhaps the mildness of the sea¬ son may have quickened the emigration of the cur¬ lews this year.

J

They spend the day in high elevated fields and sheep-walks ; but seem to descend in the night to streams and meadows, perhaps for water, which their upland haunts do not afford them.] — Obser¬ vations on Nature.

And here will be the properest place to mention,

while I think of it, an anecdote which the above-

mentioned gentleman told me when I was last at his

house ; which was that, in a warren joining to his

outlet, many daws ( Corvi monedulce) build every }'ear

80

in the rabbit-burrows under ground. The way he and his brothers used to take their nests, while they were boys, was by listening at the mouths of the holes ; and if they heard the young ones cry, they twisted the nest out with a forked stick. Some water-fowls (viz. the puffins) breed, I know, in that manner ; but I should never have sus¬ pected the daws of building in holes on the flat ground.

Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that amazing work of antiquity : which circumstance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, that they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the annoyance of shepherd boys, who are always idling round that place.

One of my neighbours last Saturday, November the 26th, saw a martin in a sheltered bottom : the sun shone warm, and the bird was hawking briskly after flies. I am now perfectly satisfied that they do not all leave this island in the winter.

You judge very right, I think, in speaking with reserve and caution concerning the cures done by toads ; for, let people advance what they will on such subjects, yet there is such a propensity in man¬ kind towards deceiving and being deceived, that

one cannot safely relate anything from common

81

report, especially in print, without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion.

Your approbation, with regard to my new dis¬ covery of the migration of the ring-ousel, gives me satisfaction ; and I find you concur with me in sus¬ pecting that they are foreign birds which visit us. You will be sure, I hope, not to omit to make in¬ quiry whether your ring-ousels leave your rocks in the autumn. What puzzles me most is the very short stay they make with us ; for in about three weeks they are all gone. I shall be very curious to remark whether they will call on us at their return in the spring, as they did last year.

I want to be better informed with regard to icthyology. If fortune had settled me near the sea-side, or near some great river, my natural pro¬ pensity would soon have urged me to have made myself acquainted with their productions : but as I have lived mostly in inland parts, and in an upland district, my knowledge of fishes extends little far¬ ther than to those common sorts which our brooks and lakes produce.

Selborne, Atov 28, 1768.

82

LETTER XXII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

As to the peculiarity of jackdaws building- with us under the ground in rabbit-burrows, you have, in part, hit upon the reason ; for, in reality, there are hardly any towers or steeples in all this country. And perhaps, Norfolk excepted, Hampshire and Sussex are as meanly furnished with churches as almost any counties in the kingdom. We have many livings of two or three hundred pounds a year whose houses of worship make little better ap¬ pearance than dove-cots. When I first saw North¬ amptonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire, and the fens of Lincolnshire, I was amazed at the number of spires which presented themselves from every point of view. As an admirer of prospects, I have reason to lament this want in mv own country ; for such objects are very necessary ingredients in an elegant landscape.

What you mention with respect to reclaimed toads raises my curiosity. An ancient author, though no naturalist, has well remarked that, “ Every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed, of mankind ” (James iii. 7).

It is a satisfaction to me to find that a green

lizard has actually been procured for you in Devon-

33

shire ; because it corroborates my discovery, which I made many years ago, of the same sort, on a sunny sandbank near Farnham in Surrey. I am well ac¬ quainted with the south hams of Devonshire ; and can suppose that district, from its southerly situa¬ tion, to be a proper habitation for such animals in their best colours.

Since the ring-ousels of your vast mountains do certainly not forsake them against winter, our sus¬ picions that those which visit this neighbourhood about Michaelmas are not English birds, but are driven from the more northern parts of Europe by the frosts, are still more reasonable ; and it will be worth your pains to endeavour to trace from whence they come, and to inquire why they make so very short a stay.

In the account you gave me of your error with regard to the two species of herons, you incidentally gave me great entertainment in your description of the heronry at Cressi Hall ; which is a curiosity I never could manage to see. Fourscore nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I would ride half as many miles to get a sight of. Pray tell me in your next whose seat Cressi Hall is, and near what town it lies.* I have often thought that those vast fens have not been sufficiently explored. If half a dozen gentlemen, furnished with a good strength of

* Cressi Hall is near Spalding, in Lincolnshire.

84

water-spaniels, were to beat them over for a week, they would certainly find more species.

There is no bird whose manners I have studied more than that of the caprimulgus (the goat-sucker) : it is a wonderful and curious creature, but I have always found that though sometimes it may chatter as it flies, as I know it does, yet in general it utters its jarring note sitting on a bough ; and I have for many a half-hour watched it as it sat with its under mandible quivering, and particularly this summer. It perches usually on a bare twig, with its head lower than its tail, in an attitude well expressed by your draughtsman in the folio “ British Zoology.” This bird is most punctual in beginning its song exactly at the close of day ; so exactly that I have known it strike up more than once or twice just at the report of the Portsmouth evening gun, which we can hear when the weather is still. It appears to me past all doubt that its notes are formed by or¬ ganic impulse, by the powers of the parts of its windpipe formed for sound, just as cats purr. You will credit me, I hope, when I assure you that as my neighbours were assembled in a hermitage on the side of a steep hill, where we drink tea sometimes, one of these churn-owls came and settled on the cross of that little straw edifice and began to chat¬ ter, and continued his note for many minutes ; and we were all struck with wonder to find that the

organs of the little animal, when put in motion, gave

85

a sensible vibration to the whole building ! This bird also sometimes makes a small squeak, repeated four or five times ; and I have observed that to happen when the cock has been pursuing the hen in a toying way through the boughs of a tree.

After a lapse of twenty years the author adds the following to his “ History of the Fern-owl or Goat¬ sucker : ” —

[The country people have a notion that the fern¬ owl, or churn-owl, or eve-jarr, which they also call a puckeridge, is very injurious to weanling calves, by inflicting, as it strikes at them, the fatal distemper known to cow-leeches by the name of puckeridge. Thus does this harmless ill-fated bird fall under a double imputation which it by no means deserves — in Italy, of sucking the teats of goats, whence it is called cciprimiilgus ; and with us of communicating a deadly disorder to cattle. But the truth of the matter is, the malady above mentioned is occasioned by the CEstrus bovis, a dipterous insect, which lays its eggs along the chines of kine, where the mag¬ gots, when hatched, eat their way through the hide of the beast into the flesh, and grow to a very large size. I have just talked with a man, who says he has more than once stripped calves who have died of the puckeridge ; that the ail or complaint lay along: the chine, where the flesh was much swelled, and filled with purulent matter. I myself once saw

a large rough maggot of this sort squeezed out of

86

the back of a cow. In Essex these maggots are called wornills.

The least observation and attention would con¬ vince men that these birds neither injure the goat¬ herd nor the grazier, but are perfectly harmless, and subsist alone, being night birds, on night insects, such as scarabcei and p balance ; and through the month of July mostly on the Scarabceus solstitialis , which in many districts abounds at that season. Those that we have opened have always had their craws stuffed with large night moths and their eggs, and pieces of chafers : nor does it anywise appear how they can, weak and unarmed as they seem, inflict any harm upon kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism, and can affect them by fluttering over them.

A fern-owl this evening (August 27) showed off in a very unusual and entertaining manner, by hawking round and round the circumference of my great spreading oak for twenty times following, keeping mostly close to the grass, but occasionally glancing up amidst the boughs of the tree. This amusing bird was then in pursuit of a brood of some particular phalcena belonging to the oak, of which there are several sorts ; and exhibited on the occa¬ sion a command of wing superior, I think, to that of the swallow itself.

When a person approaches the haunt of fern-owls

in an evening, they continue flying round the head

87

of the obtruder ; and by striking their wings to¬ gether above their backs, in the manner that the pigeons called smiters are known to do, make a smart snap : perhaps at that time they are jealous for their young; and their noise and gesture are intend¬ ed by way of menace.

Fern-owls seem to have an attachment to oaks, no doubt on account of food ; for the next evening we saw one again several times among the boughs of the same tree ; but it did not skim round its stem over the grass, as on the evening before. In May these birds find the Scarabceus melolontha on the oak ; and the Scarabceus solstitialis at midsummer ; but they can only be watched and observed for two hours in the twenty-four; and then in a dubious twilight an hour after sunset and an hour before sunrise.

On this day (July 14, 1789) a woman brought me two eggs of a fern-owl or eve-jarr, which she found on the verge of the Hanger, to the left of the her¬ mitage, under a beechen shrub. This person, who lives just at the foot of the Hanger, seems well acquainted with these nocturnal swallows, and says she has often found their eggs near that place, and that they lay only two at a time on the bare ground. The eggs were oblong, dusky, and streaked some¬ what in the manner of the plumage of the parent bird, and were equal in size at each end. The dam was sitting on the eggs when found, which contained

the rudiments of young, and would have been

88

hatched perhaps in a week. From hence we may see the time of their breeding, which corresponds pretty well with that of the swift, as does also the period of their arrival. Each species is usually seen about the beginning of May. Each breeds but once in a sum¬ mer ; and each lays only two eggs.

July 4, 1790. The woman who brought me two fern-owls’ eggs last year on July 14, on this day pro¬ duced me two more, one of which had been laid this morning, as appears plainly, because there was only one in the nest the evening before. They were found, as last July, on the verge of the down above the hermitage under a beechen shrub, on the naked ground. Last year those eggs were full of young, and just ready to be hatched.

These circumstances point out the exact time when these curious nocturnal migratory birds lay their eggs, and hatch their young. Fern-owls, like snipes, stone-curlews, and some other birds, make no nest. Birds that build on the ground do not make much of their nests.]— Observations on Nature.

It would not be at all strange if the bat, which you have procured, should prove a new one, since five species have been found in a neighbouring king¬ dom. The great sort that I mentioned is certainly a nondescript: I saw but one this summer, and that I had no opportunity of taking.

Your account of the Indian grass was entertain¬ ing. I am no angler myself ; but inquiring of those

89

that are what they supposed that part of their tackle to be made of, they replied “ of the intestines of a silkworm.”

Though I must not pretend to great skill in en¬ tomology, yet I cannot say that I am ignorant of that kind of knowledge : I may now and then perhaps be able to furnish you with a little information.

The vast rains ceased with us much about the same time as with you, and since then we have had delicate weather. Mr. Barker, who has measured the rain for more than thirty years, says, in a late let¬ ter, that more has fallen this year than in any he ever attended to; though from July, 1763, to Janu¬ ary, 1764, more fell than in any seven months of this year.

Selborne, Jan. 2, 1769.

LETTER XXIII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

It is not improbable that the Guernsey lizard and

our green lizards may be specifically the same ; all

that I know is, that, when some years ago many

Guernsey lizards were turned loose in Pembroke

College garden, in the university of Oxford, they

lived a great while, and seemed to enjoy themselves

very well, but never bred. Whether this circum-

90

stance will prove anything either way I shall not pretend to say.

I return you thanks for your account of Cressi Hall; but recollect, not without regret, that in June, 1746, I was visiting for a week together at Spalding, without ever being told that such a curiosity was just at hand. Pray tell me in your next what sort of tree it is that contains such a quantity of herons’ nests; and whether the heronry consists of a whole grove or wood, or only of a few trees.

It gave me satisfaction to find we accorded so well about the caprimulgus : all I contended for was to prove that it often chatters sitting as well as fly¬ ing ; and therefore the noise was voluntary, and from organic impulse, and not from the resistance of the air against the hollow of its mouth and throat.

If ever I saw anything like actual migration, it

was last Michaelmas Day. I was travelling, and out

early in the morning : at first there was a vast fog ;

but by the time that I was got seven or eight miles

from home towards the coast, the sun broke out into

a delicate warm day. We were then on a large

heath or common, and I could discern, as the mist

began to break away, great numbers of swallows

( Hir undines rusticce) clustering on the stunted shrubs

and bushes, as if they had roosted there all night.

As soon as the air became clear and pleasant they

all were on the wing at once ; and, by a placid and

easy flight, proceeded on southward towards the

91

sea : after this I did not see any more flocks, only now and then a straggler.

I cannot agree with those persons who assert that the swallow kind disappear gradually, as they come, for the bulk of them seem to withdraw at once: only some few stragglers stay behind a long while, and never, there is reason to believe, leave this island. Swallows seem to lay themselves up, and to come forth in a warm day, as bats do continually of a warm evening after they have disappeared for weeks. For a very respectable gentleman assured me that, as he was walking with some friends under Merton wall on a remarkably hot noon, either in the last week in December or the first week in January, he espied three or four swallows huddled together on the moulding of one of the windows of that college. I have frequently remarked that swallows are seen later at Oxford than elsewhere : is this owing to the vast massy buildings of that place, to the many waters round it, or to what else ?

When I used to rise in a morning last autumn, and see the swallows and martins clustering on the chimneys and thatch of the neighbouring cottages, I could not help being touched with a secret delight, mixed with some degree of mortification : with de¬ light, to observe with how much ardour and punctu¬ ality those poor little birds obeyed the strong im¬ pulse towards migration, or hiding, imprinted on

their minds by their great Creator; and with some

92

degree of mortification, when I reflected that, after all our pains and inquiries, we are yet not quite cer-

Cottages next to “ The Wakes.”

tain to what regions they do migrate ; and are still farther embarrassed to find that some do not actu¬ ally migrate at all.

These reflections made so strong an impression on my imagination, that they became productive of a composition that may perhaps amuse you for a quarter of an hour when next I have the honour of writing to you.

Selborne, February 28, 1769.

93

LETTER XXIV.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

The Scarabceus fullo I know very well, having seen it in collections ; but have never been able to discover one wild in its natural state. Mr. Banks told me he thought it might be found on the sea coast.

On the 13th of April I went to the sheep-down, where the ring-ousels have been observed to make their appearance at spring and fall, in their way per¬ haps to the north or south ; and was much pleased to see three birds about the usual spot. We shot a cock and a hen ; they were plump and in high con¬ dition. The hen had but very small rudiments of eggs within her, which proves they are late breed¬ ers ; whereas those species of the thrush kind that remain with us the whole year have fledged )Toung before that time. In their crops was nothing very distinguishable, but somewhat that seemed like blades of vegetables nearly digested. In autumn they feed on haws and yew-berries, and in the spring on ivy-berries. I dressed one of these birds, and found it juicy and well-flavoured. It is remarkable that they only stay a few days in their spring visit, but rest nearly a fortnight at Michaelmas. These birds, from the observations of three springs and

two autumns, are most punctual in their return; and

94

exhibit a new migration unnoticed by the writers, who supposed they never were to be seen in any of the southern counties.

One of my neighbours lately brought me a new Salicaria, which at first I suspected might have proved your willow-lark ; * but, on a nicer examina¬ tion, it answered much better to the description of that species which you shot at Revesby, in Lincoln¬ shire. My bird I describe thus : — “ It is a size less than the grasshopper-lark; the head, back, and cov¬ erts of the wings of a dusky brown, without those dark spots of the grasshopper-lark ; over each eye is a milkwhite stroke ; the chin and throat are white, and the under parts of a yellowish white : the rump is tawny, and the feathers of the tail sharp-pointed ; the bill is dusky and sharp, and the legs are dusky ; the hinder claw long and crooked.” The person that shot it says that it sung so like a reed-sparrow that he took it for one ; and that it sings all night : but this account merits farther inquiry. For my part, I suspect it as a second sort of locustella , hinted at by Dr. Derham in “ Ray’s Letters.” He also pro¬ cured me a grasshopper-lark.

The question that you put with regard to those genera of animals that are peculiar to America, viz. how they came there, and whence? is too puzzling for me to answer; and yet so obvious as often to

* For this Salicaria , or sedge-warbler, see Letter XXVI. August 30, 1769.

9

95

have struck me with wonder. If one looks into the writers on that subject little satisfaction is to be found. Ingenious men will readily advance plausible arguments to support whatever theory they shall choose to maintain ; but then the misfortune is, every one’s hypothesis is each as good as another’s, since they are all founded on conjecture. The late writers of this sort, in whom may be seen all the arguments of those that have gone before, as I remember, stock America from the western coast of Africa and the south of Europe; and then break down the Isthmus that bridged over the Atlantic. But this is making use of a violent piece of machinery : it is a difficulty worthy of the interposition of a god ! “ Incredulus

odi.” “ I feel disgusted and disbelieving.”

THE NATURALIST’S SUMMER-EVENING WALK.

- “ equidem credo , quia sit divinitus illis

Ingenium ” * — Virg. Georg, i. 415, 416.

When day declining sheds a milder gleam,

What time the May-fly haunts the pool or stream ;

When the still owl skims round the grassy mead,

What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed :

Then be the time to steal adown the vale,

And listen to the vagrant cuckoo’s tale ;

To hear the clamorous curlew \ call his mate,

Or the soft quail his tender pain relate ;

To see the swallow sweep the dark’ning plain Belated, to support her infant train ;

To mark the swift in rapid giddy ring Dash round the steeple, unsubdued of wing :

* “ I think their instinct is divinely bestowed.” f Charadrius oedicnemus.

96

Beeches in the long lythe.

The lythe was a favorite walk of White’s.

Amusive birds ! say where your hid retreat When the frost rages and the tempests beat ;

Wh ence your return, by such nice instinct led,

When spring, soft season, lifts her bloomy head?

Such baffled searches mock man’s prying pride,

The God of Nature is your secret guide !

While deep’ning shades obscure the face of day To yonder bench leaf- shelter’d let us stray,

Till blended objects fail the swimming sight,

And all the fading landscape sinks in night ;

To hear the drowsy dorr come brushing by With buzzing wing, or the shrill cricket * cry ;

To see the feeding bat glance through the wood ;

To catch the distant falling of the flood ;

While o’er the cliff th’ awaken’d churn-owl hung Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song ; While high in air, and pois’d upon his wings,

Unseen, the soft enamour’d woodlark sings:

These, Nature’s works, the curious mind employ, Inspire a soothing melancholy joy :

As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain

Steals o’er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein !

Each rural sight, each sound, each smell combine ; The tinkling sheep-bell, or the breath of kine ;

The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze,

Or cottage-chimney smoking through the trees.

The chilling night-dews fall : — away, retire ;

For see, the glowworm lights her amorous fire !

Thus, ere night’s veil had half obscured the sky,

Th’ impatient damsel hung her lamp on high :

True to the signal, by love’s meteor led,

Leander hasten’d to his Hero’s bed.

Selborxe, May 29, 1769.

* Gry lilts campesti is.

97

LETTER XXV.

To the Honourable Daines Barrington.

When I was in town last month I partly engaged that I would some time do myself the honour to write to you on the subject of natural history : and 1 am the more ready to fulfil my promise, because I see you are a gentleman of great candour, and one that will make allowances ; especially where the writer professes to be an out-door naturalist, one that takes his obseryations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others.

The following is a list of the summer birds of passage which I haye discoyered in this neighbour¬ hood, ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear:

RAII NOMINA.

APPEARS ABOE'T

tor- The middle of March : harsh note.

low-wren, tatus.

IO. White-throat, Ficedula affinis.

low-wren, [_ tatus.

3. Swallow, Hirundo domestica.

4. Martin, Hirundo rustica.

5. Sand-martin, Hirundo riparia.

6. Blackcap, A tricapilla.

7. Nightingale, Luscinia.

8. Cuckoo, CuluIus.

9. Middle wil- Regulus non cris-

ber.

April 13.

Ditto.

Ditto.

April 13 : a sweet wild note. Beginning of April.

Middle of April..

L Ditto : a sweet plaintive note.

J

Ditto: mean note; sings on

11. Red-start, Ruticilla.

12. Stone-curlew, Oedicnemus.

till September.

Ditto : more agreeable song. End of March : loud nocturnal

whistle.

98

cottage in the lythe .

APPEARS ABOUT.

13. Turtle-dove,

14. Grasshopper-

lark,

15. Swift,

16. Less reed-

sparrow,

17. Land-rail,

1 3. Largest wil¬ low-wren,

19. Goat-sucker, or 1

, r Ca-brimulsrus. r ern-owl, j r *

20. Fly-catcher, Stoparola.

Middle of April : a small sibi- lous note, till the end of July. April 27.

A sweet polyglot, but hurrying :

it has the notes of many birds. A loud harsh note, “ crex, crex.” r “ Cantat voce stridula locustm

€VIS~ 1

-j end of April ; on the tops of l high beeches, f Begfinnino; of May : chatters by night with a singular noise, f May 12. A very mute bird, ■i This is the latest summer ^ bird of passage.

RAII NOMINA. Turtur.

I Alauda minimal

[_ locustce voce.

Hirundo apus.

f Passer arandina- 1 \

ecus minor. Ortygometra,

f Resrulus non tatus.

This assemblage of curious and amusing birds be¬ longs to ten several genera of the Linngean system ; and are all of the ordo of passercs , save the jynx and

cuculus , which are piece ^ and the charadrius (oe diene nuts) and rallns ( ortygometra ), which are grallce.

These birds, as they stand numerically, belong to the following: Linnaean gmnera : —

o o

I.	Jynx.	13. Columba.
2, 6. 7, 9, io, ii,	16, iS. Motacilla.	17. Rallus.
3> 4> 5i	Hirundo.	19. Caprimulgus.
S.	Cuculus.	14. Alauda.
12.	Charadrius.	20. Muscicapa.

Most soft-billed birds live on insects, and not on grain and seeds ; and therefore at the end of summer thev retire : but the following soft-billed birds, though insect-eaters, stay with us the year round : —

	RAII NOMINA.
Redbreast, Wren,	Rube cilia. Passer ti'oglodytes.	' These frequent houses, and \ haunt outbuildings in the l winter : eat spiders.
II edge-sparrow,	Curruca.	Haunts sinks for crumbs and other sweepings.
		These frequent shallow rivu¬
White-wagtail,	Motacilla alba.	lets near the spring heads,
Y ello w-wagtail,	Motacilla flava.	-i where thev never freeze ; eat
Grey-wagtail,	Motaci lla ci nerea .	1 the aui-elice of Phrvganea. ' The smallest birds that walk.
Wheat-ear,	Oenanthe.	Some of these are to be seen with us the winter through.
Whin-chat,	Oenanthe secunda.
Stone-chatter,	Oenanthe teriia.
Golden-crowned wren,	1 ' Re gill us cn status. 0	f This is the smallest British bird : haunts the tops of tall trees : stays the winter through.

A List of the Winter Birds of Passage round this neighbourhood, rangred somewhat in the order in which they appear : —

1 00

1. Ring-ousel,

2. Redwing,

3. Fieldfare,

4. Royston-crow,

5. Woodcock,

6. Snipe,

7. Jack-snipe,

f This is a new migration, which

! I have lately discovered about Merula torquata. , ,

1 1 Michaelmas week, and asam

[_ about the 14th of March.

Turdus iliacus. About old Michaelmas.

Turdus pilaris. { ThouSh a Percher by day’

[ roosts on the ground.

Cornix cinerea. Most frequent on downs.

Scolopax. Appears about old Michaelmas.

r' it ■ f Some snipes constantly breed

6 -aUinago minor. \ r J

l with us.

Gallinago minima.

8. Wood-pigeon,

9. Wild-swan,

10. Wild-goose,

11. Wild-duck,

12. Pochard,

13. Widgeon,

14. Teal, breeds

with us in j Wolmer For- j est, j

15. Cross-beak,

16. Cross-bill,

17. Silk-tail, \

Oenas.

Cygnus ferns.

A user ferns. f Anas torquata [ minor.

Anas fera fnsca. Penelope.

■ Qnerqnednla.

Coccoth ra ustes. Loxia.

Garrulns bohemi- cns.

j Seldom appears till late : not L in such plenty as formerly. On some large waters.

► On our lakes and streams.

1 These are only wanderers that appear occasionally, and are not observant of any regular migration.

These birds, as they stand numerically, belong to the following Linnaean genera : —

I, 2, 3, Turdus.

4, Corvus.

5, 6, 7, Scolopax.

8, Coin mb a.

9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

A nas.

15, 16, Loxia.

17, Ampelis.

Birds that sing in the night are but few : —

f “ In shadiest covert hid.” — - Milton.

Nightingale,

Luscinia.

Woodlark,

Less reed-sparrow, -j

Alauda arborea. Suspended in mid air.

[ ceus minor. j

I should now proceed to such birds as continue to sing- after Midsummer, but, as they are rather numer- ous, they would exceed the bounds of this paper; be¬ sides, as this is now the season for remarking on that subject, I am willing to repeat my observations on some birds concerning the continuation of whose song I seem at present to have some doubt.

Selborne, June 30, 1769.

[As one of my neighbours was traversing Wolmer Forest from Bramshot, across the moors, he found a large uncommon bird fluttering in the heath, but not wounded, which he brought home alive. On exam, ination it proved to be Colymbus glacialis, Linn., the great speckled diver or loon, which is most excel¬ lently described in “ Willughby’s Ornithology.”

Every part and proportion of this bird is so in¬ comparably adapted to its mode of life, that in no in¬ stance do we see the wisdom of God in the creation to more advantage. The head is sharp, and smaller than the part of the neck adjoining, in order that it may pierce the water ; the wings are placed forward and out of the centre of gravity, for a purpose which shall be noticed hereafter ; the thighs quite at the podex, in order to facilitate diving ; and the legs are flat, and as sharp backwards almost as the edge of a

102

knife, that in striking they may easily cut the water : while the feet are palmated, and broad for swim¬ ming, yet so folded up when advanced forward to take a fresh stroke, as to be full as narrow as the shank. The two exterior toes of the feet are long¬ est ; the nails flat and broad, resembling the human, which give strength and increase the power of swim¬ ming. The foot, when expanded, is not at right angles to the leg or body of the bird ; but the exte¬ rior part inclining towards the head forms an acute angle with the body ; the intention being not to give motion in the line of the legs themselves, but by the combined impulse of both in an intermediate line — the line of the body.

Most people know, that have observed at all, that the swimming of birds is nothing more than a Walk¬ ing in the water, where one foot succeeds the other as on the land ; yet no one, as far as I am aware, has remarked that diving fowls, while under water, im¬ pel and row themselves forward by a motion of their wings, as well as by the impulse of their feet: but such is really the case, as any person may easily be convinced, who will observe ducks when hunted by dogs in a clear pond. Nor do I know that any one has given a reason why the wings of diving fowls are placed so forward : doubtless, not for the purpose of promoting their speed in flying, since that position certainly impedes it ; but probably for the increase

of their motion under water, by the use of four oars

103

instead of two ; yet, were the wings and feet nearer together, as in land-birds, they would, when in ac¬ tion, rather hinder than assist one another.

This colymbus was of considerable bulk, weighing only three drachms short of three pounds avoirdu¬ pois. It measured in length from the bill to the tail (which was very short) two feet, and to the extremi¬ ties of the toes four inches more ; and the breadth of the wings expanded was forty-two inches. A person attempted to eat the body, but found it very strong and rancid, as is the flesh of all birds living on fish. Divers or loons, though bred in the most northerly parts of Europe, yet are seen with us in very severe winters ; and on the Thames are called sprat loons, because they prey much on that sort of fish.

The legs of the colymbi and mergi are placed so very backward and so out of all centre of gravity, that these birds cannot walk at all. They are called by Linnaeus compedes , because they move on the ground as if shackled or fettered.

A man brought me a landrail or daker-hen, a bird so rare in this district that we seldom see more than one or two in a season, and those only in autumn. This is deemed a bird of passage by all the writers: vet from its formation seems to be poorly qualified for migration ; for its wings are short, and placed so forward and out of the centre of gravity, that it flies in a very heavy and embarrassed manner, with its legs hanging down ; and can hardly be sprung a sec-

104

ond time, as it runs very fast, and seems to depend more on the swiftness of its feet than on its flying.

When we came to draw it, we found the entrails so soft and tender, that in appearance they might have been dressed like the ropes of a woodcock. The craw or crop was small and lank, containing a mucus ; the gizzard thick and strong, and filled with small shell-snails, some whole, and many ground to pieces through the attrition which is occasioned by the muscular force and motion of that intestine. We saw no gravels among the food ; perhaps the shell- snails might perform the functions of gravels or peb¬ bles, and might grind one another. Landrails used to abound formerly, I remember, in the low wet bean-fields of Christian Malford in North Wilts, and in the meadows near Paradise Gardens at Oxford, where I have often heard them cry “ crex, crex.” The bird mentioned above weighed oz., was fat and tender, and in flavour like the flesh of a wood¬ cock. The liver was very large and delicate.] — Ob¬ servations ox Nature.

LETTER XXVI.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of the ousel migration pleases you. You put a very

shrewd question when you ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is southward? Was not candour and openness the very life of natural his¬ tory, I should pass over this query just as a sly com¬ mentator does over a crabbed passage in a classic ; but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that I only rea¬ soned in that case from analogy. For as all other autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of our milder winters, and return to the northward again when the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the same, as well as their congeners the fieldfares ; and especially as ring-ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries : but 1 have good reason to suspect since that they may come to us from the westward ; be¬ cause I hear, from very good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor, and that they forsake that wild district about the time that our visitors appear, and do not return till late in the spring.

I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and mine, with a white stroke over its eve and a tawny rump. I have surveyed it alive and dead, and have procured several specimens ; and am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will soon be convinced of the same) that it is neither more nor less than the Passer arundinacens minor of Ray. This bird, by some means or other, seems to be en¬ tirely omitted in the “ British Zoology ; ” and one

106

reason probably was, because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who ranges it among his Pici affine s. It ought no doubt to have gone among his small birds with the tail of one colour ( Avionics caudd uni¬ colore ), and among your slender-billed birds of the same division. Linnaeus might, with great propriety, have put it into his genus of motacilla , and the Mo- tacilla sahcaria of his “ Fauna Suecica ” seems to come the nearest to it. It is no uncommon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and day during the breeding time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow,, a sky¬ lark, and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the de¬ scription of your ien-sa/icaria shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent characteristic of it when he says, — “ Rostrum et pedes in Jidc avicula multo major es sunt quam pro corporis rationed “ The beak and feet of this little bird are much too large for its body.”

I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus , or stone- curlew, which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground : there were two ; but the finder in¬ advertently crushed one with his foot before he saw them.

When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish

I had not forgot to mention the faculty that snakes

107

10

have of stinking to defend themselves, se defendendo. I knew a gentleman who kept a tame snake, which

a

Among the hedgerows.

was in its person as sweet as any animal while in

good humour and unalarmed ; but as soon as a

stranger, or a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing,

and filled the room with such nauseous effluvia as

rendered it hardly supportable. Thus the skunck, or

stonck, of Ray’s Synop. Ouadr., is an innocuous and

ioS

sweet animal ; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such a most pestilent and fetid smell and excrement, than which nothing can be more horrible.

A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the Lanins minor cinerascens cum macula in scapulis alba Raii ; which is a bird that, at the time of your pub¬ lishing your first two volumes of British Zoology, I find you had not seen. You have described it well from Edwards’s drawing.

Selborne, Aug. 30, 1769.

LETTER XXVII.

To the Honourable Daines Barrington.

When I did myself the honour to write to you about the end of last June on the subject of natural history, I sent you a list of the summer birds of pas¬ sage which I have observed in this neighbourhood ; and also a list of the winter birds of passage : I mentioned besides those soft-billed birds that stay with us the winter through in the south of Eng¬ land, and those that are remarkable for singing in the night.

According to mv proposal, I shall now proceed to such birds (singing birds strictly so called) as

continue in full song till after Midsummer ; and shall range them somewhat in the order in which they first begin to open as the spring advances.

RAII NOMINA.

1. Woodlark,	A Ian da arbor ea.
2. Song-thrush, 1	Turdns simpliciter dictus.
3. Wren,	Passer troglodytes. -
4. Redbreast,	Rubecula.
Hedge-spar- r J & r ^ Curruca. row, j
6. Yellow-ham- mer,	' Emberiza ftava.
7. Skylark,	Alauda vulgaris.
S. Swallow,	Hirundo domestica.
9. Blackcap,	Atiicapilla.
10. Titlark,	Alauda praiorum. ^ l
11. Blackbird,	r Merula vulgaris, f
12. White-throat,	Ficedula affinis. j
13. Goldfinch,	_ r Carduelis.
14. Greenfinch,	Chloris.
13. Fess reed-spar- 'Passer atundiua- r 1 . y row, ceus jmtior.
16. Common lin¬ net,	V Linaria vulgaris. 1

In January, and continues to sing through all the summer and autumn.

In February and on to August, reassume their song in autumn.

All the year, hard frost ex¬ cepted.

Ditto.

Early in February to July the loth.

Early in February, and on through July to August the 2 1 st.

In February, and on to October.

From April to September.

Beginning of April to July the 13th.

From middle of April to July the 16th.

Sometimes in February and March, and so on to July the 23rd ; reassumes in autumn.

In April, and on to July the 23rd.

April, and through to Septem¬ ber the 16th.

On to July and August the 2nd.

May, on to beginning of July.

Breeds and whistles on till August ; reassumes its note when they begin to congre- gate in October, and again early before the flocks sepa¬ rate.

no

Birds that cease to be in full song, and are usually silent at or before midsummer: —

RAII NOMINA.

17. Middle willow- [ 'Regains non cris- [Middle of June: begins in wren, [_ tatus.

iS. Redstart, Ruticilla.

19. Chaffinch,

20. Nightingale,

Birds that the spring : —

Fringilla.

Luscinia.

\

\

[_ April.

Ditto : begins in May. f Beginning of June: sings first ' in February.

f Middle of June: sings first in

21. Missel-bird,

22. Great Tit¬ mouse, or Ox-eye,

L April.

sing for a short time, and very early in

January the 2nd, 1770, in Feb¬ ruary. Is called in Hampshire and Sussex the storm-cock, because its song is supposed to forbode windy, wet weath¬ er : is the largest singing bird we have.

In February, March, April : re¬ assumes for a short time in September.

Tardus vi.\ civ or us.

1

r Fringillago.

J

Birds that have somewhat of a note or song, and yet are hardly to be called singing birds : —

23. Golden-crown- j ed wren,

' Its note as minute as its per¬ son : frequents the tops of

Regains cnstatus. ^ , • , , , r „

J * 1 high oaks and firs : the small-

I .

[ est British bird.

24. Marsh-tit- | Haunts great woods : two

r Paras fialustris. \ , , ,

mouse, j r y harsh, sharp notes.

25. Small willow- j Regains non cris- j Sings in March, and on to Sep-

wren, j tatus. i tember.

26. Largest ditto, Ditto.

\

f “ Cantat voce stridula locustae from end of April to August. 27. Grasshopper- \ Alauda minima f Chirps all night, from the middle lark, j voce locustce. ^ of April to the end of July.

in

~ ,. rr ■ , .. f All the breeding time; from

2b. Martin, Hirundo agrestis. ^ ’

L May to September.

29. Bullfinch, Pyrrhula.

tj rr 7 ■ jl From the end of January to

30. Bunting-, Fmbenza alba. 4 j j

l July.

All singing birds, and those that have any pre¬ tensions to song, not only in Britain, but perhaps the world through, come under the Linnaean or do of

passeres.

The above-mentioned birds, as they stand numer¬ ically, belong to the following Linnaean genera : —

1, 7, 10, 27.

2, 11, 21.

3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 17, iS, 20, 23, 25,

Alauda.

T urdus.

1

r r Motacilla. 26. j

6, 30.

Emberiza.

8, 28. Hirundo.

13, 16, 19. Fringilla.

22, 24. Par us.

14, 29. Loxia.

Birds that sing as they fly are but few : —

RAII NOMINA.

Skylark,	Alauda vulgaris.	Rising, suspended, and falling. In its descent ; also sitting on
Titlark,	Alauda pratoVum.	trees, and walking on the l ground.
Woodlark,	Alauda arborea.	f Suspended ; in hot summer nights all night long.
Blackbird,	Merula.	Sometimes from bush to bush.
White-throat,	Fi cedula affinis.	f Uses when singing on the wing i odd jerks and gesticulations.
Swallow,	Hirundo domestica.	In soft sunny weather.
Wren,	Passer troglodytes.	Sometimes from bush to bush.
Birds that breed most early in these parts : —
Raven,	Corvus.	Hatches in F ebruary and March.
Song-thrush,	Turdus.	In March.
Blackbird,	Merula.	Ditto.

1 12

Rook,

Woodlark,

Ring-dove,

Cornix frugilega. Alanda arborea.

| Pahimbus torqua- y tiis.

Builds the beginning of March. Hatches in April.

1

r Lays the beginning of April.

All birds that continue in full song- till after Mid¬ summer appear to me to breed more than once.

Most kinds of birds seem to me to be wild and shy somewhat in proportion to their bulk ; I mean in this island, where they are much pursued and an¬ noyed : but in Ascension Island, and many other desolate places, mariners have found fowls so unacquainted with a human figure, that they would stand still to be taken ; as is the case with boobies, &c.

As an example of what is advanced, 1 remark that the golden- crested wren (the smallest

Golden-crested wrens.

concerned until you come

within three or four yards of it, while the bustard (otis), the largest British land fowl, does not care to admit a person within so many furlongs.

British bird) will stand un

Selborne, Nov. 2, 1769.

LETTER XXVIII.

To Thomas Pennant, Esq.

I WAS much gratified by your communicative let¬ ter on your return from Scotland, where you spent, I find, some considerable time, and gave yourself good room to examine the natural curiosities of that extensive kingdom, both those of the islands, as well as those of the highlands. The usual bane of such expeditions is hurry ; because men seldom allot them¬ selves half the time they should do: but, fixing on a day for their return, post from place to place, rather as if they were on a journey that required despatch, than as philosophers investigating the works of na¬ ture. You must have made, no doubt, many dis- coveries, and laid up a good fund of materials for a future edition of the British Zoology ; and will have no reason to repent that you have bestowed so much pains on a part of Great Britain that perhaps was never so well examined before.

It has always been matter of wonder to me that fieldfares, which are so congenerous to thrushes and blackbirds, should never choose to breed in England : but that they should not think even the highlands cold and northerly, and sequestered enough, is a cir¬ cumstance still more strange and wonderful. The ring-ousel, you find, stays in Scotland the whole year round ; so that we have reason to conclude that those

migrators that visit us for a short space every au¬ tumn do not come from thence.

And here, I think, will be the proper place to mention that those birds were most punctual again in their migration this autumn, appearing, as before, about the thirtieth of September : but their flocks were larger than common, and their stay protracted somewhat beyond the usual time. If they came to spend the whole winter with us, as some of their con¬ geners do, and then left us, as they do, in spring, I should not be so much struck with the occurrence, since it would be similar to that of the other winter birds of passage ; but when I see them for a fort¬ night at Michaelmas, and again for about a week in the beginning of April, I am seized with wonder, and long to be informed whence these travellers come, and whither they go, since they seem to use our hills merely as an inn or baiting-place.

Your account of the greater brambling, or snow- flock, is very amusing ; and strange it is that such a short-winged bird should delight in such perilous voyages over the northern ocean ! Some country people in the winter time have every now and then told me that they have seen two or three white larks on our downs; but, on considering the matter, I be¬ gin to suspect that these are some stragglers of the birds wo are talking of, which sometimes perhaps may rove so far to the southward.

It pleases me to find that white hares are so fre-

quent on the Scottish mountains, and especially as you inform me that it is a distinct species, for the quadrupeds of Britain are so few, that every new species is a great acquisition.

The eagle-owl, could it be proved to belong to us, is so majestic a bird that it would grace our fauna much. I never was informed before where wild geese are known to breed.

You admit, I find, that I have proved your fen- salicaria to be the lesser reed-sparrow of Ray : and I think you may be secure that I am right ; for I took very particular pains to clear up that matter, and had some fair specimens ; but, as they were not well preserved, they are decayed already. You will, no doubt, insert it in its proper place in your next edition. Your additional plates will much improve your work.

De Buff on, I know, has described the water shrew-mouse ; but still I am pleased to find you have discovered it in Lincolnshire, for the reason I have given in the article of the white hare.

As a neighbour was lately ploughing in a dry chalky field, far removed from any water, he turned out a water-rat, that was curiously laid up in an hy- bernaculum artificially formed of grass and leaves. At one end of the burrow la)' about a gallon of po¬ tatoes regularly stowed, on which it was to have sup¬ ported itself for the winter. But the difficulty with

me is how this amphibius inns came to fix its win-

116

ter station at such a distance from the water. Was it determined in its choice of that place by the mere accident of finding' the potatoes which weie planted there ? or is it the practice of the apuatic lat to for¬ sake the neighbourhood of the water in the colder

months ?

Though 1 delight very little in analogous reason- ing, knowing how fallacious it is with respect to nat¬ ural history ; yet, in the following instance, I cannot help being inclined to think it may conduce towards the explanation of a difficulty that I have mentioned before, with respect to the invariable early retreat of the Hirundo apis, or swift, so many weeks before its congeners ; and that not only with us, but also in Andalusia, where they also begin to retire about the beginning of August.

The great large bat* (which by the way is at present a nondescript in England, and what I have never been able yet to procure) retires or migrates very early in the summer: it also ranges very high for its food, feeding in a different region of the air ; and that is the reason I never could procure one. Now this is exactly the case with the swifts, for they take their food in a more exalted region than the other species, and are very seldom seen hawking for flies near the ground, or over the surface of the

* The little Bat appears almost every month in the year ; but I have never seen the large one till the end of April, nor after July. They are most common in June, but never very plentiful.

water. From hence I would conclude that these hir undines , and the larger bats, are supported by some sorts of high-flying gnats, scarabs, or phalcence that are short of continuance ; and that the short stay of these strangers is regulated by the defect of their food.

By my journal it appears that curlews clamoured on to October the 31st; since which I have not seen or heard any. Swallows were observed on to No- vember the third.

Selborne, Dec. 8, 1769.

LETTER XXIX.

To the Honourable Daines Barrington.

It was no small matter of satisfaction to me to find that you were not displeased with my little methodus of birds. If there is any merit in the sketch, it must be in its exactness. For many months I car¬ ried a list in my pocket of the birds that were to be remarked on ; and, as I rode or walked about, I noted each day the continuance or omission of each bird’s song ; so that I am as sure of my facts as a man can be of any transaction whatsoever.

I shall now proceed to answer the several queries

which you put in your two obliging letters, in the

best manner that I am able. Perhaps Eastwick, and

118

its environs, where you heard so very few birds, is not a woodland country, and therefore not stocked with such songsters. If you will cast your eye on my last letter, you will find that many species con¬ tinued to warble after the beginning of July.

The titlark and yellowhammer breed late, the lat¬ ter very late ; and therefore it is no wonder that they protract their song : for I lay it down as a maxim in ornithology, that as long as there is any incubation going on there is music. As to the red¬ breast and wren, it is well known to the most in¬ curious observer that they whistle the year round, hard frost excepted ; especially the latter.

It was not in my power to procure you a black¬ cap, or a lesser reed-sparrow, or sedge-bird, alive. As the first is undoubtedly, and the last, as far as I can yet see, a summer bird of passage, they would require more nice and curious management in a cage than I should be able to give them : they are both distinguished songsters. The note of the blackcap has such a wild sweetness that it always brings to my mind those lines in a song in As You Like It , —

“ And tune his merry note Unto the wild bird’s throat.”

Shakespeare.

The sedge-bird has a surprising variety of notes resembling the song of several other birds ; but then it has also a hurrying manner, not at all to its advan¬ tage : it is notwithstanding a delicate polyglot.

It is new to me that titlarks in cages sing in the night ; perhaps only caged birds do so. I once knew a tame redbreast in a cage that always sang as long as candles were in the room ; but in their wild state no one supposes they sing in the night.

I should be almost ready to doubt the fact, that there are to be seen much fewer birds in July than in any former month, notwithstanding so many young are hatched daily. Sure I am that it is far otherwise with respect to the swallow tribes, which increase prodigiously as the summer advances. I saw, at the time mentioned, many hundreds of young wagtails on the banks of the Cherwell, which almost covered the meadows. If the matter appears as you say in the other species, may it not be owing to the dams being engaged in incubation, while the young are concealed by the leaves ?

Many times have I had the curiosity to open the stomach of woodcocks and snipes ; but nothing ever occurred that helped to explain to me what their subsistence might be : all that I could ever find was a soft mucus, among which lay many pellucid small gravels.

Selborne, Jan. 15, 1770.

120

LETTER XXX.

To the Honourable Daines Barrington.

Your observation that “ the cuckoo does not de¬ posit its egg indiscriminately in the nest of the first bird that comes in its way, but probably looks out a nurse in some degree congenerous, with whom to intrust its young,” is perfectly new to me ; and struck me so forcibly, that I naturally fell into a train of thought that led me to consider whether the fact was so, and what reason there was for it.