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The Natural History of Selborne

by Gilbert White · English · Gutenberg #1408 · 507,502 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Natural History of Selborne

Author: Gilbert White


        
Release date: August 1, 1998 [eBook #1408]
                Most recently updated: March 26, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1408

Credits: Tokuya Matsumoto


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE ***

The Natural History of Selborne

by Gilbert White




INVITATION TO SELBORNE.


See, Selborne spreads her boldest beauties round
The varied valley, and the mountain ground,
Wildly majestic ! What is all the pride,
Of flats, with loads of ornaments supplied ?—
Unpleasing, tasteless, impotent expense,
Compared with Nature’s rude magnificenee.

Arise, my stranger, to these wild scenes haste;
The unfinish’d farm awaits your forming taste:
Plan the pavilion, airy, light, and true;
Through the high arch call in the length’ning view;
Expand the forest sloping up the hill;
Swell to a lake the scant, penurious rill;
Extend the vista; raise the castle mound
In antique taste, with turrets ivy-crown’d:
O’er the gay lawn the flow’ry shrub dispread,
Or with the blending garden mix the mead;
Bid China’s pale, fantastic fence delight;
Or with the mimic statue trap the sight.

Oft on some evening, sunny, soft, and still,
The Muse shall lead thee to the beech-grown hill,
To spend in tea the cool, refreshing hour,
Where nods in air the pensile, nest-like bower;
Or where the hermit hangs the straw-clad cell,
Emerging gently from the leafy dell,
By fancy plann’d; as once th’ inventive maid
Met the hoar sage amid the secret shade:
Romantic spot ! from whence in prospect lies
Whate’er of landscape charms our feasting eyes’—
The pointed spire, the hall, the pasture plain,
The russet fallow, or the golden grain,
The breezy lake that sheds a gleaming light,
Till all the fading picture fail the sight.

Each to his task; all different ways retire:
Cull the dry stick; call forth the seeds of fire;
Deep fix the kettle’s props, a forky row,
Or give with fanning hat the breeze to blow.

Whence is this taste, the furnish’d hall forgot,
To feast in gardens, or th’ unhandy grot ?
Or novelty with some new charms surprises,
Or from our very shifts some joy arises.
Hark, while below the village bells ring round,
Echo, sweet nymph, returns the soften’d sound;
But if gusts rise, the rushing forests roar,
Like the tide tumbling on the pebbly shore.

Adown the vale, in lone, sequester’d nook,
Where skirting woods imbrown the dimpling brook,
The ruin’d convent lies: here wont to dwell
The lazy canon midst his cloister’d cell,
While Papal darkness brooded o’er the land,
Ere Reformation made her glorious stand:
Still oft at eve belated shepherd swains
See the cowl’d spectre skim the folded plains.

To the high Temple would my stranger go,
The mountain-brow commands the woods below:
In Jewry first this order found a name,
When madding Croisades set the world in flame;
When western climes, urged on by pope and priest
Pour’d forth their minions o’er the deluged East:
Luxurious knights, ill suited to defy
To mortal fight Turcestan chivalry.

Nor be the parsonage by the Muse forgot —
The partial bard admires his native spot;
Smit with its beauties, loved, as yet a child,
Unconscious why, its capes, grotesque and wild.
High on a mound th’ exalted gardens stand,
Beneath, deep valleys, scoop’d by Nature’s hand.
A Cobham here, exulting in his art,
Might blend the general’s with the gardener’s part;
Might fortify with all the martial trade
Of rampart, bastion, fosse, and palisade;
Might plant the mortar with wide threat’ning bore,
Or bid the mimic cannon seem to roar:

Now climb the steep, drop now your eye belong
Where round the blooming village orchards grow;
There, like a picture, lies my lowly seat,
A rural, shelter’d, unobserved retreat.

Me far above the rest Selbornian scenes,
The pendent forests, and the mountain greens,
Strike with delight; there spreads the distant view,
That gradual fades till sunk in misty blue:
Here Nature hangs her slopy woods to sight,
Rills purl between and dart a quivering light.




SELBORNE HANGER.


A WINTER PIECE, TO THE MISS B*****S


The bard, who sang so late in blithest strain
Selbornian prospects, and the rural reign,
Now suits his plaintive pipe to sadden’d tone,
While the blank swains the changeful year bemoan.

How fallen the glories of these fading scenes !
The dusky beech resigns his vernal greens;
The yellow maple mourns in sickly hue,
And russet woodlands crowd the dark’ning view.

Dim, clust’ring fogs involve the country round,
The valley and the blended mountain ground
Sink in confusion; but with tempest-wing
Should Boreas from his northern barrier spring,
The rushing woods with deaf’ning clamour roar,
Like the sea tumbling on the pebbly shore.
When spouting rains descend in torrent tides,
See the torn zigzag weep its channel’d sides:
Winter exerts its rage; heavy and slow,
From the keen east rolls on the treasured snow;
Sunk with its weight the bending boughs are seen,
And one bright deluge whelms the works of men.
Amidst this savage landscape, bleak and bare,
Hangs the chill hermitage in middle air;
Its haunts forsaken, and its feasts forgot,
A leaf-strown, lonely, desolated cot !
Is this the scene that late with rapture rang,
Where Delphy danced, and gentle Anna sang ?
With fairy step where Harriet tripp’d so late,
And, on her stump reclined, the musing Kitty sate ?

Return, dear nymphs; prevent the purple spring,
Ere the soft nightingale essays to sing;
Ere the first swallow sweeps the fresh’ning plain,
Ere love-sick turtles breathe their amorous pain;
Let festive glee th’ enliven’d village raise,
Pan’s blameless reign, and patriarchal days;
With pastoral dance the smitten swain surprise,
And bring all Arcady before our eyes.

Return, blithe maidens; with you bring along
Free, native humour; all the charms of song;
The feeling heart, and unaffected ease;
Each nameless grace, and ev’ry power to please.

_Nov_. 1, 1763.




ON THE RAINBOW.


“Look upon the Rainbow, and praise him that made it: very beautiful is
it in the brightness thereof.”—_Eccles_., xliii. 11.


On morning or on evening cloud impress’d,
Bent in vast curve, the watery meteor shines
Delightfully, to th’ levell’d sun opposed:
Lovely refraction ! while the vivid brede
In listed colours glows, th’ unconscious swain,
With vacant eye, gazes on the divine
Phenomenon, gleaming o’er the illumined fields,
Or runs to catch the treasures which it sheds.

Not so the sage: inspired with pious awe,
He hails the federal arch ; and looking up,
Adores that God, whose fingers form’d this bow
Magnificent, compassing heaven about
With a resplendent verge, “Thou mad’st the cloud,
“Maker omnipotent, and thou the bow;
“And by that covenant graciously hast sworn
“Never to drown the world again: henceforth,
“Till time shall be no more, in ceaseless round,
“Season shall follow season: day to night,
“Summer to winter, harvest to seed time,
“Heat shall to cold in regular array
“Succeed.”—Heav’n taught, so sang the Hebrew bard.




A HARVEST SCENE.


Waked by the gentle gleamings of the morn,
Soon clad, the reaper, provident of want,
Hies cheerful-hearted to the ripen’d field:
Nor hastes alone: attendant by his side
His faithful wife, sole partner of his cares,
Bears on her breast the sleeping babe; behind,
With steps unequal, trips her infant train;
Thrice happy pair, in love and labour join’d !

All day they ply their task; with mutual chat,
Beguiling each the sultry, tedious hours.
Around them falls in rows the sever’d corn,
Or the shocks rise in regular array.

But when high noon invites to short repast,
Beneath the shade of sheltering thorn they sit,
Divide the simple meal, and drain the cask:
The swinging cradle lulls the whimpering babe
Meantime; while growling round, if at the tread
Of hasty passenger alarm’d, as of their store
Protective, stalks the cur with bristling back,
To guard the scanty scrip and russet frock.




ON THE DARK, STILL, DRY, WARM WEATHER.


OCCASIONALLY HAPPENING IN THE WINTER MONTHS.


Th’ imprison’d winds slumber within their caves,
Fast bound: the fickle vane, emblem of change,
Wavers no more, long settling to a point.

All Nature nodding seems composed: thick steams,
From land, from flood up-drawn, dimming the day,
“Like a dark ceiling stand:” slow through the air
Gossamer floats, or, stretch’d from blade to blade,
The wavy net-work whitens all the field.

Push’d by the weightier atmosphere, up springs
The ponderous mercury, from scale to scale
Mounting, amidst the Torricellian tube.

While high in air, and poised upon his wings,
Unseen, the soft, enamour’d woodlark runs
Through all his maze of melody; the brake,
Loud with the blackbird’s bolder note, resounds.

Sooth’d by the genial warmth, the cawing rook
Anticipates the spring, selects her mate,
Haunts her tall nest-trees, and with sedulous care
Repairs her wicker eyrie, tempest-torn.

The ploughman inly smiles to see upturn
His mellow globe, best pledge of future crop:
With glee the gardener eyes his smoking beds;
E’en pining sickness feels a short relief

The happy schoolboy brings transported forth
His long-forgotten scourge, and giddy gig:
O’er the white paths he whirls the rolling hoop,
Or triumphs in the dusty fields of taw.

Not so the museful sage:—abroad he walks
Contemplative, if haply he may find
What cause controls the tempest’s rage, or whence,
Amidst the savage season, Winter smiles.

For days, for weeks, prevails the placid calm.
At length some drops prelude a change: the sun
With ray refracted, bursts the parting gloom,
When all the chequer’d sky is one bright glare.

Mutters the wind at eve; th’ horizon round
With angry aspect scowls: down rush the showers,
And float the deluged paths, and miry fields.




THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE


In a series of letters addressed to
THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ.
and
The Hon. DAINES BARRINGTON




ADVERTISEMENT


The Author of the following Letters takes the liberty, with all proper
deference, of laying before the public his idea of parochial history,
which, he thinks, ought to consist of natural productions and
occurrences as well as antiquities. He is also of opinion that if
stationary men would pay some attention to the districts on which they
reside, and would publish their thoughts respecting the objects that
surround them, from such materials might be drawn the most complete
county-histories, which are still wanting in several parts of this
kingdom, and in particular in the county of Southampton.

And here he seizes the first opportunity, though a late one, of
returning his most grateful acknowledgments to the reverend the
President and the reverend and worthy the Fellows of Magdalen College
in the University of Oxford, for their liberal behaviour in permitting
their archives to be searched by a member of their own society, so far
as the evidences therein contained might respect the parish and priory
of Selborne. To that gentleman also, and his assistant, whose labours
and attention could only be equalled by the very kind manner in which
they were bestowed, many and great obligations are also due.

Of the authenticity of the documents above-mentioned there can be no
doubt, since they consist of the identical deeds and records that were
removed to the College from the Priory at the time of its dissolution;
and, being carefully copied on the spot, may be depended on as genuine;
and, never having been made public before, may gratify the curiosity of
the antiquary, as well as establish the credit of the history.

If the writer should at all appear to have induced any of his readers
to pay a more ready attention to the wonders of the Creation, too
frequently overlooked as common occurrences; or if he should by any
means, through his researches, have lent an helping hand towards the
enlargement of the boundaries of historical and topographical
knowledge; or if he should have thrown some small light upon ancient
customs and manners, and especially on those that were monastic, his
purpose will be fully answered. But if he should not have been
successful in any of these his intentions, yet there remains this
consolation behind—that these his pursuits, by keeping the body and
mind employed, have, under Providence, contributed to much health and
cheerfulness of spirits, even to old age:—and, what still adds to his
happiness, have led him to the knowledge of a circle of gentlemen whose
intelligent communications, as they have afforded him much pleasing
information, so, could he flatter himself with a continuation of them,
would they ever be deemed a matter of singular satisfaction and
improvement.

GIL. WHITE.


Selborne,
January 1st, 1788.




THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE


LETTERS to THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ.




Letter I


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


The parish of Selborne lies in the extreme eastern corner of the county
of Hampshire, bordering on the county of Sussex, and not far from the
county of Surrey; is about fifty miles south-west of London, in
latitude 51, 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, Faringdon, Harteley Mauduit, Great Ward le Ham,
Kingsley, 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 graceful pendulous boughs. The down, or
sheep-walk, is a pleasing park-like spot, of about one mile by half
that space, jutting out on the verge of the hill-country, where it
begins to break down into the plains, and commanding a very engaging
view, being an assemblage of hill, dale, wood-lands, heath, and water.
The prospect is bounded to the south-east and east by the vast range of
mountains called the Susses-downs, by Guild-down 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 extensive 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 remarkable 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 enclosures 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 wood 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 at the north-west end frequently fails;
but the other is a fine perennial spring, little influenced by drought
or wet seasons, called Well-head.* This breaks out of some high grounds
joining to Core Hill, a noble chalk promontory, remarkable 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 falling into the
British Channel: the other to the north. The Selborne stream makes one
branch of the Wey; and meeting the Black-down stream at Hedleigh, and
the Alton and Farnham stream at Tilford-bridge, swells into a
considerable river, navigable at Godalming; from whence it passes to
Guildford, and so into the Thames at Weybridge; and thus at the Nore
into the German Ocean.

* This spring produced, September 14, 1781, after a severe hot summer,
and a preceding dry spring and winter, nine gallons of water in a
minute, which is five hundred and forty in an hour, and twelve thousand
nine hundred and sixty, or two hundred and sixteen hogsheads, in
twenty-four hours, or one natural day. At this time many of the wells
failed, and all the ponds in the vales were dry.


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 element, but
which does not lather well with soap.

To the north-west, north and east of the village, is a range of fair
enclosures, consisting of what is called a white malm, a sort of rotten
or rubble stone, which, when turned up to the frost and rain, moulders
to pieces, and becomes manure to itself.*

* This soil produces good wheat and clover.


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 Wolmer-forest, at the
juncture of the clays and sand the soil becomes a wet, sandy loam,
remarkable for timber, and infamous for roads. The oaks of Temple and
Blackmoor stand high in the estimation of purveyors, and have furnished
much naval timber; while the trees on the freestone grow large, but are
what workmen call shakey, and so brittle as often to fall to pieces in
sawing. Beyond the sandy loam the soil becomes an hungry lean sand,
till it mingles with the forest; and will produce little without the
assistance of lime and turnips.




Letter II


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


In the court of Norton-farmhouse, a manor farm to the north-west of the
village, on the white maims, stood within these twenty years a
broad-leaved elm, or wych hazel, ulmus folio latissimo scabro of Ray,
which, though it had lost a considerable leading bough in the great
storm in the year 1703, equal to a moderate tree, yet, when felled,
contained eight loads of timber; and, being too bulky for a carriage,
was sawn off at seven feet above the butt, where it measured 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, and vulgarly called the Plestor. In the
midst of this spot stood, in old times, a vast oak, with a short 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 former 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 certainly have been, as will appear from what will be said farther
concerning this area, when we enter on the antiquities of Selborne.

On the Blackmoor estate there is a small wood called Losel’s, of a few
acres, that was lately furnished 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
purveyor find in this little wood, with this advantage, that many of
them answered the description at sixty feet. These trees were sold for
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 residence
for such a series of years, that the oak was distinguished 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 hazardous. So the ravens built on, nest upon
nest, in perfect 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.




Letter III


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


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 appearance, which, to an incurious
eye, seems like a petrified fish of about four  inches long, the cardo
passing for an head and mouth. It is in reality a bivalve of the
Linnaean genus of Mytilus, and the species of Crista Galli; called by
Lister, Rastellum; by Rumphius, Ostreum plicatum minus; by
D’Argenville, Auris Porci, s. Crista Galli, and by those who make
collections cock’s comb. Though I applied to several such in London, I
could never meet with an entire specimen; nor could I ever find in
books any engraving from a perfect one. In the superb museum at
Leicester-house, permission was given me to examine for this article;
and though I was disappointed 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
flutings or grooves, and the curved form of my specimen being much
easier expressed by the pencil than by words, I have caused it to be
drawn and engraved.

Cornua Ammonis are very common about this village. 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 considerable
size. In the lane above Well-head, in the way to Emshot, they abound in
the bank, in a darkish 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, perhaps fourteen or sixteen inches in diameter.
But as these did not consist of firm stone, but were formed 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 a
very recent production. In the chalk-pit, at the north-west end of the
Hanger, large nautili are sometimes 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 striated, and ridged and furrowed alternately. They are
highly impregnated with, if not wholly composed of, the stone of the
quarry.




Letter IV


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


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 request for hearth-stones 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 chiseled
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 surbedded, but laid in the same position as
it grows in the quarry.** On the ground abroad this firestone 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, ferments strongly in mineral 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 valuable 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 considerable 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.

* There may probably be also in the chalk itself that is burnt for lime
a proportion of sand: for few chalks are so pure as to have none.


** To surbed stone is to set it edgewise, contrary to the posture it
had in the quarry, says Dr. Plot, Oxfordsh., p. 77. But surbedding does
not succeed in our dry walls; neither do we use it so in ovens, though
he says it is best for Teynton stone.


*** ‘Firestone is full of salts, and has no sulphur: must be close
grained, and have no interstices. Nothing supports fire like salts;
saltstone perishes exposed to wet and frost.’ Plot’s Staff., p. 152.


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 together 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 becoming 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 tenpenny
nails.’




Letter V


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


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 shudder while they ride along
them; but delight the naturalist with their various botany, and
particularly with their curious filices with which they abound.

The manor of Selborne, was it strictly looked after, with 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 enclosures; 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 business, 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 considerable, as may be
supposed in so woody and mountainous a district. As my experience in
measuring the water is but of short date, I am not qualified to give
the mean quantity.* I only know that:

                                                       Inch. Hund.
From May 1, 1779, to the end of the year, there fell    28    37!
From Jan. 1, 1780, to Jan. 1, 1781, there fell          27    32
From Jan. 1, 1781, to Jan. 1, 1782, there fell          30    71
From Jan. 1, 1782, to Jan. 1, 1783, there fell          50    26!
From Jan. 1, 1783, to Jan. 1, 1784, there fell          33    71
From Jan. 1, 1784, to Jan. 1, 1785, there fell          33    80
From Jan. 1, 1785, to Jan. 1, 1786, there fell          31    55
From Jan. 1, 1786, to Jan. 1, 1787, there fell          39    57

* A very intelligent gentleman assures me (and he speaks from upwards
of forty years’ experience) that the mean rain of any plate cannot be
ascertained till a person has measured it for a very long period. ‘If I
had only measured the rain,’ says he, ‘for the four first years from
1740 to 1743, I should have said the mean rain at Lyndon was 16 and a
half inches for the year, if from 1740 to 1750, 18 and a half inches.
The mean rain before 1763 was 20 and a quarter, from 1763 and since, 25
and a half; from 1770 to 1780, 26. If only 1773, 1774 and 1775 had been
measured, Lyndon mean rain would have been called 32 inches.’


The village of Selborne, and large hamlet of Oak-hanger, with the
single farms, and many scattered 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 chambers 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 harvest 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 neighbouring
town, by some of the people called Quakers: but from circumstances this
trade is at an end.** The inhabitants enjoy a good share of health and
longevity: and the parish swarms with children.

* A state of the parish of Selborne, taken October 4, 1783.


The number of tenements or families, 136.
The number of inhabitants in the street is … 313
In the rest of the parish … 363
Total, 676; near five inhabitants to each tenement.
In the time of the Rev. Gilbert White, vicar, who died in 1727–8, the
number of inhabitants was computed at about 500.)


Average of baptisms for 60 years.


From 1720 to 1729, both years inclusive     Males   6,9     Females
6,0     12,9
From 1730 to 1739, both years inclusive     Males   8,2     Females
7,1     15,3
From 1740 to 1749, inclusive     Males   9,2     Females   6,6     15,8
From 1750 to 1759, inclusive     Males   7,6     Females   8,1     15,7
From 1760 to 1769, inclusive     Males   9,1     Females   8,9     18,0
From 1770 to 1779, inclusive     Males   10,5     Females   9,8     20
3

Total baptisms of Males     515
Females     465     980
Total of baptisms from 1720 to 1779, both inclusive, 60 years
980.

Average of burials for 60 years.


From 1720 to 1729, both years inclusive     Males   4,8     Females
5,1     9,9
From 1730 to 1739, both years inclusive     Males   4,8     Females
5,8     10,6
From 1740 to 1749, inclusive     Males   4,6     Females   3,8     8,4
From 1750 to 1759, inclusive     Males   4,9     Females   5,1     10,0
From 1760 to 1769, inclusive     Males   6,9     Females   6,5     13,4
From 1770 to 1779, inclusive     Males   5,5     Females   6,2     11,7

Total of burials of Males   315
Females   325     640

Total of burials from 1720 to 1779 both inclusive, 60 years   640.

Baptisms exceed burials by more them one-third.

Baptisms of Males exceed Females by one-tenth, or one in ten.

Burials of Females exceed Males by one in thirty.

It appears that a child, born and bred in this parish, has an equal
chance to live above forty years.

Twins thirteen times, many of whom dying young have lessened the chance
for life.

Chances for life in men and women appear to be equal.


A TABLE of the Baptisms, Burials, and Marriages, from January 2, 1761,
to December 25, 1780, in the Parish of Selborne.

Baptisms.

1761     Males   8     Females   10     Total   18 1762     7     8    
 15 1763     8     10     18 1764     11     9     20 1765     12     6
    18 1766 9     13     22 1767     14     5     19 1768     7     6  
  13 1769     9 14     23 1770     10     13     23 1771     10     6  
  16 1772     11 10     21 1773     8     5     13 1774     6     13   
 19 1775     20     7 27 1776     11     10     21 1777     8     13   
 21 1778     7     13 20 1779     14     8      22 1780     8     9    
17 198     188     386

Burials.

1761     Males   2     Females   4     Total     6 1762     10    10   
 20 1763     3     4     7 1764     10     8     18 1765     9     7   
 16 1766 10     6     16 1767     6      5      11 1768     2     5    
7 1769     6 5     11 1770     4     7     11 1771     3     4     7
1772     6     10 16 1773     7     5     12 1774     2     8      10
1775     13     8     21 1776     4     6      10 1777     7     2     
9 1778     3     9      12 1779 5     6     11 1780     11     4     
15 123     123     246

Marriages.

1761     3 1762     6 1763     7 1764     6 1765     6 1766     4 1767 
   2 1768     6 1769     2 1770     3 1771     4 1772     3 1773     3
1774     1 1775     6 1776     6 1777     4 1778     5 1779     0 1780 
   3 83

During this period of twenty years the births of Males exceeded those
of Females     10.

The burials of each sex were equal.

And the births exceeded the deaths     140.

** Since the passage above was written, I am happy in being able to say
that the spinning employment is a little revived, to the no small
comfort of the industrious housewife.




Letter VI


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


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 vegetable; 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 proceed
eastward, by the parishes of Greatham, Lysse, Rogate, 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 subterraneous trees; though Dr. Plot
says positively,* that ‘there never were any fallen trees hidden in the
mosses of the southern counties.’ But he was mistaken: for I myself
have seen cottages on the verge 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.**
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 examination, and trial by fire, I could discover nothing
resinous in them; and therefore rather suppose that they were parts of
a willow or alder, or some such aquatic tree.

* See his Hist. of Staffordshire.


** Old people 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. Dr. Hales saith, ‘That the warmth of the earth, at
some depth under ground, has an influence in promoting a thaw, as well
as the change of the weather from a freezing to a thawing state, is
manifest, from this observation, viz. Nov. 29, 1731, a little snow
having fallen in the night, it was, by eleven the next morning, mostly
melted away on the surface of the earth, except in several places in
Bushy Park, where there were drains dug and covered with earth, on
which the snow continued to lie, whether those drains were full of
water or dry; as also where elm-pipes lay under ground: a plain proof
this, that those drains intercepted the warmth of the earth from
ascending from greater depths below them: for the snow lay where the
drain had more than four feet depth of earth over it. It continued also
to lie on thatch, tiles, and the tops of walls.’ See Hales’s
Haemastatics, p. 360. Quaere.— Might not such observations be reduced
to domestic use, by promoting the discovery of old obliterated drains
and wells about houses; and in Roman stations and camps lead to the
finding of pavements, baths and graves, and other hidden relics of
curious antiquity?


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 discovered
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
excursions: 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 sportsmen 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, black-game, or grouse.
When I was a little boy I recollect one coming now and then to my
father’s table. The last pack remembered was killed about thirty-five
years ago; and within these ten years one solitary greyhen was sprung
by some beagles in beating for a hare. The sportsmen cried out, ‘A hen
pheasant’; but a gentleman present, who had often seen grouse in the
north of England, assured me that it was a greyhen.

Nor 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 toward 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-grandfather (mentioned in a perambulation taken in 1635),
grandfather, father, and self, enjoyed the head keepership of
Wolmer-forest in succession for more than an 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. 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 attention of the greatest sovereign! But he further 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 Cumberland. It
is now more than thirty years ago that his highness sent down an
huntsman, and six yeoman-prickers, in scarlet jackets laced with gold,
attended by the stag-hounds; ordering them to take every deer in this
forest alive, and 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
carried off, such fine chases were exhibited as served the country
people for matter of talk and wonder for years afterwards. I saw myself
one of the yeoman-prickers single out a stag from the herd, and must
confess that it was the most curious feat of activity I ever beheld,
superior to anything in Mr. Astley’s riding-school. 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, Esquire


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 enormities, that
government was forced to interfere with that severe and sanguinary act
called the Black Act,* which now comprehends more felonies than any law
that ever was framed before. And, therefore, a late bishop of
Winchester, when urged to re-stock Waltham-chase,** refused, from a
motive worthy of a prelate, replying that ‘it had done mischief enough
already.’

* Statute 9 Geo. I. c. 22.


** This chase remains unstocked to this day; the bishop was Dr. Hoadly.


Our old race of deer-stealers are hardly extinct yet: it was but a
little while ago that, over their ale, they used to recount 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 manner: 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 country 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 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 exceptis.* The
reason, I presume, why sheep** are excluded, is, because, being such
close grazers, they would pick out all the finest grasses, and hinder
the deer from thriving.

* For the privilege the owner of that estate used to pay to the king
annually seven bushels of oats.


** In the Holt, where a full stock of fallow-deer has been kept up till
lately, no sheep are admitted to this day.


Though (by statute 4 and 5 W. and Mary, c. 23) ‘to burn on any waste,
between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath and furze, goss
or fern, is punishable with whipping and confinement in the house of
correction’; yet, in this forest, 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, catching the hedges, have
sometimes been communicated to the underwoods, woods, and coppices,
where great damage has ensued. The plea for these burnings is, that,
when the old coat of heath, etc., is consumed, 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 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 vegetation are to be found for
years. These conflagrations, 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 twenty-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 village, 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
annually on the feast of St. Barnabas, taking the old materials for a
perquisite. The farm called Blackmoor, in this parish, is obliged to
find the posts and brush-wood for the former; while the farms at
Greatham, 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, Esquire


On the verge of the forest, as it is now circumscribed, are three
considerable lakes, two in Oakhanger, 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 sportsman. For, being crowded at the
upper end with willows, and with the carex cespitosa,* it affords such
a safe and pleasing shelter to wild-ducks, teals, snipes, etc., 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. [For which consult Letter XLI to Mr. Barrington.]

* I mean that sort which, rising into tall hassocks, is called by the
foresters torrets, a corruption, I suppose, of turrets. Note. In the
beginning of the summer 1787 the royal forests of Wolmer and Holt were
measured by persons set down by government.


By a perambulation of Wolmer-forest and the 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 circumscribed. For, to
say nothing on 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 Ward le Ham park, in which stands the
curious mount called King John’s Hill, and Lodge Hill; and to the verge
of Hartley Mauduit, called Mauduit-hatch; comprehending also
Short-heath, Oakhanger, and Oakwoods; a large district, 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 considerable, growing
at that time in the district of the Halt; 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 by no means peculiar to
them, I cannot pass over in silence; and that is, that instinct by
which in summer 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 feeding. 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 subsisted but from this
contingency. Thus nature, who is a great economist, converts the
recreation of one 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 lie; 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, containing, 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 reckoning.

On the face of this expanse of waters, and perfectly secure from
fowlers, lie all day long, in the winter season, vast flocks of ducks,
teals, and widgeons, 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 more, and were it planted
round with thick covert (for now it is perfectly naked), it might make
a valuable 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. But, as such discoveries more
properly belong to the antiquities of this place, I shall suppress all
particulars for the present, till I enter professedly on my series of
letters respecting the more remote history of this village and
district.




Letter IX


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


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

* In ‘Rot. Inquisit. de statu forest. in Scaccar.,’ 36, Ed. 3, it is
called Aisholt. In the same, ‘Tit. Woolmer and Aisholt Hantisc. Dominus
Rex habet unam capellam in haia sua de Kingesle.’ ‘Haia, sepes,
sepimentum, parcus: a Gall. haie and haye.’—Spelman’s Glossary.


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 age, long surviving her
husband; and, at her death, left behind her many 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 possession of Mr. Elmer, the celebrated
game-painter at Farnham, in the county of Surrey.

** This prince was the inventor of mezzotinto.


Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow range of
enclosures, 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 near 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 Bentley;
all of which have right of common.

One thing is remarkable; that, though the Holt has been of old
well-stocked with fallow-deer, unrestrained 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 keepers, and the severe penalties that have been put in force
against them as often as they have been detected, and rendered liable
to the lash of the law. Neither fines nor imprisonment 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 destroyed them.

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 estimated 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 Godalming in the county of Surrey.




Letter X


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


August 4, 1767.

It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose
studies have led them 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 rusticae) being found in a torpid state
during the winter in the Isle of Wight, or any part of this country, I
never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman, 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 were, at first appearance, dead, but, on being carried
toward the 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 people
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 (hirundines urbicae) were then fledged in
their nests. Both species will breed again once. For I see by my Fauna
of last year, that young broods come forth so late as September the
eighteenth. Are not these late hatchings more in favour of hiding than
migration? 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 is it 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; and once I saw numbers of house-martins on the
seventh of November. The martins and red-wing fieldfares were flying in
sight together; an uncommon assemblage of summer and winter birds.

A little bird (it is either a species of the alauda trivialis, or
rather perhaps of the motacilla trochilus) still continues to make a
sibilous shivering noise in the tops of tall woods. The stoparola of
Ray (for which we have as yet no name in these parts) is called, in
your Zoology, the fly-catcher. There is one circumstance characteristic
of this bird, which seems to have escaped observation, and that is,
that 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 trochilus:
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 black-cap (motacilla
atricapilla) be a bird of passage or not: I think there is no doubt of
it: for, in April, in the very first fine weather, they come trooping,
all at once, into these parts, but are never seen in the winter. 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 piping and humming 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 plenty in harvest, at which time I will take care to get more; and
will endeavour to put the matter 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
discovered 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 (see Syst. Nat.), which he
says ‘natat in fossis et urinator.’ I should be glad to procure one
‘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
brachyuros’ of Ray, 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 ‘qualem dices.. . antehac fuisse, tales cum
sint religuiae!’

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 English hawks;
neither could I find any like it at the curious exhibition of stuffed
birds in Spring-gardens. 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 country, full of hills
and woods, and therefore full of birds.




Letter XI


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, September 9, 1767.

It will not be without impatience, that I shall wait for your thoughts
with regard to the falco; as to its weight, breadth, etc., I wish I had
set them down at the time; but, to the best of my remembrance, 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 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 irides.

The most unusual birds I ever observed in these parts were a pair of
hoopoes (upupa) which came several years ago in the summer, and
frequented an ornamented piece of ground, which joins to my garden, 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 frightened and persecuted by idle boys, who would
never let them be at rest.

Three gross-beaks (loxia coccothraustes) appeared some years ago in my
fields, in the winter; one of which I shot: since that, now and then
one is occasionally seen in the same dead season.

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

Our streams, which are small, and rise only at the end of the village,
yield nothing but the bull’s head or miller’s thumb (gobius fluviatilis
capitatus), the trout (trutta fluviatilis), the eel (anguilla), the
lampern (lampaetra parka 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 in hard weather frequent our lakes in
the forest.

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 cannot eat.

The young of the barn-owl are not easily raised, as they want a
constant supply of fresh mice: whereas the young of the brown owl will
eat indiscriminately all that is brought; snails, rats, kittens,
puppies, 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.

Red-starts, fly-catchers, white-throats, and reguli non cristati, still
appear; but I have seen no black-caps lately.

I forgot 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.

At present I know only two species of bats, the common vespertilio
murinus and the vespertilio auritus.

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 the flies, which were always rejected, was
worthy of observation, and pleased me much. Insects seem 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
improbable 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 surface cannot get on the wing again, by rising with great
ease from the floor. It ran, I observed, with more dispatch 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 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 places: the air swarmed
with them all along the Thames, so that hundreds were in sight at a
time.

I am, etc.




Letter XII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


November 4, 1767.

Sir,

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 before; but
that, I find, would be a difficult task.

* This hawk proved to be the falco peregrinus; a variety.


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 domesticus medius 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
many as eight at a litter, in a little round nest composed of the
blades of grass or wheat.

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 belonged. It was so compact
and well filled, that it would roll across the table without being
discomposed, 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 increasing in
bulk. This wonderful procreant cradle, an elegant instance of the
efforts of instinct, was found in a wheat-field, 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 expect:
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 end 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 Philosoph. Letters, that great flocks of them,
feeding upon haws, appeared in this kingdom in the winter of 1685.

The mention of haws put 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 missal-thrushes, and feeding on the
berries of the yew-tree, which answered to the description of the
merula torquata, or ring-ousel, were lately seen in this neighbourhood.
I employed some people to procure me a specimen, but without success.
See Letter XX.

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, etc. ? Before winter perhaps
they might be hardened, and able to shift for themselves.

About ten years ago I 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 assemble 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 season 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 persuaded of that fact, that he talks,
in his calendar of Flora, as familiarly of the swallows 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 settling 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 from so midland a county, attempt a voyage to Goree or Senegal,
almost as far as the equator?*

* See Adamson’s Voyage to Senegal.


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 during
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 suspect 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 torpid state in
the winter. But with regard to their migration, 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!




Letter XIII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Jan. 22, 1768.

Sir,

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 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 all mostly 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 common linnets; more, I
think, than can be bred in any one district. These, I observe, when the
spring advances, 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 well known, at least, that the swallows and the fieldfares do
congregate with a gentle twittering before they make 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 enclosed district it is a rare bird.

Wagtails, 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 (oenanthe)
does not quit England, it certainly 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 credibly 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.
They may, 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, especially 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 man, possessed of fortune, health, and leisure, should make
an autumnal voyage into that kingdom; and should spend a year there,
investigating 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.

* See Ray’s Travels, p. 466.


I have no friend left now at Sunbury to apply to about the swallows
roosting on the aits of the Thames: nor can I hear any more about those
birds which I suspected were merulae torquatae.

As to the small mice, I have farther to remark, that though they hang
their nests for breeding up amidst the straws of the standing corn,
above the 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 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 a
third of an ounce avoirdupois: so that I suppose they are the smallest
quadrupeds in this island. A full-grown mus medius domesticus 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.

I am, etc., etc.




Letter XIV


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, March 12, 1768.

Dear Sir,

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
breathing-places, beside the nostrils; probably analogous to the puncta
lachrymalia in the human head. When the 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 inconvenience, 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 singular 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 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 curious
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 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 much use
of those orifices as of his nostrils, applying them to the fruit, and
seeming to smell it through them.’


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

Τετράδυμοι ῥινὲς, πίσυρες πνοίῃσι δίαυλοι.
Quadrifidæ nares, quadruplices ad respirationem canales.
Opp. _Cyn_. lib. ii. 1. 181.


Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say that goats
breathe at their ears; whereas he asserts just the contrary:—Ἀλκμαίων
γὰρ οὐκ ἀληθῆ λέγει, φάμενος ἀναπνεῖν τὰς αἶγας κατὰ τὰ ὠτά. ‘Alcmaeon
does not advance what is true, when he avers that goats breathe through
their ears.’—History of Animals. Book I. chap. xi.




Letter XV


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Mark 30, 1768.

Dear Sir,

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

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

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

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

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

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
parus, and was too long and too big for the golden-crowned wren,
appearing most like the largest willow-wren. It hung sometimes with its
back downwards, 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 oedicnemus, should be
mentioned by the writers as a rare bird: it abounds in all the
champaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the
summer, having 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, ‘circa aquas versantes’;
for with us, by day at 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, Esquire


Selborne, April 18, 1768.

Dear Sir,

The history of the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus 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, etc., and are withdrawn to some flinty
field by their 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 almost any day; and any evening you may hear them round the
village, for they make a clamour which 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 constancy, 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 continues 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 an hundred yards distance;
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 yet hatched, I should have hardly believed
but that it had been a locusta whispering in the bushes. The country
people laugh when you tell them that it is the note of a bird. It is a
most artful creature, 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 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, gaping and shivering with its wings. Mr. Ray himself
had no knowledge of this bird, but received his account from Mr.
Johnson, who apparently confounds it with the reguli non cristati, from
which it is very distinct. See Ray’s Philosophical Letters, p. 108.

The fly-catcher (stoparola) has not yet appeared: 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 pease,
cherries, currants, etc., and are so tame that a gun will not scare
them.

A List of the summer birds of passage discovered in this neighbourhood,
ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear:

                          Linnæi Nomina
Smallest willow-wren,    _Motacilla trochilus._
Wryneck,                 _Lynx torquilla._
House-swallow,           _Hirundo rustica._
Martin,                  _Hirundo urbica._
Sand-martin,             _Hirundo riparia._
Cuckoo,                  _Cuculus canorus._
Nightingale,             _Motacilla luscinia._
Black-cap,               _Motacilla atricapilla._
White-throat,            _Motacilla sylvia._
Middle willow-wren,      _Motacilla trochilus._
Swift,                   _Hirundo apus._
Stone curlew,?           _Charadrius oedicnemus?_
Turtle-dove,?            _Turtur aldrovandi?_
Grasshopper-lark,        _Alauda trivialis._
Landrail,                _Rallus crex._
Largest willow-wren,     _Motacilla trochilus._
Redstart,                _Motacilla phœnicurus._
Goat-sucker, or fern-owl,    _Caprimulgus europæus._
Fly-catcher,             _Muscicapa grisola._

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 sitta
europaea (the nut-hatch). Mr. Ray says that the less spotted woodpecker
does the same. This noise may be heard a furlong or more.

Now is the only time to ascertain the short-winged summer birds; for,
when the leaf is out, there 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-time snipes play over the moors, piping and humming: they
always hum as they are descending. Is not their hum ventriloquous like
that of a 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 lice a titmouse, with its back
downwards.

Yours, etc., etc.




Letter XVII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, June 18, 1768.

Dear Sir,

On 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 acquainted with, so well as I
could wish, with regard to their natural history. There is a degree of
dubiousness and obscurity attending the propagation of this class of
animals, sometimes analogous to that of the cryptogamia in the sexual
system of plants: and the case is the same as regards some of the
fishes: as the eel, etc.

The method in which toads procreate and bring forth seems to me 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 ἔσω μὲν
ὠοτὸκοι, ἔξω δε ζωοτόκοι, as is known to be the case with the viper.

The copulation of frogs (or at least the appearance of it; for
Swammerdam proves that the male has no penis intrans) is notorious to
everybody: because we see them sticking upon each other’s backs for a
month together in spring: and yet I never saw, or read, of toads being
observed in the same situation. 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 authority, 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, till he grew to a
monstrous size, with the maggots which turn to flesh flies. The reptile
used to come forth every evening from an hole under the garden-steps;
and was taken up, after supper, on the table to be fed. 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. After this
accident 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 Creation (p. 365), concerning the migration of frogs from their
breeding ponds. In this account he at once subverts 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 defer 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 myriads of these
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 oeconomy of
Providence with regard to the limbs of so vile a reptile! While it is
aquatic 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.

Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances that the rana
arborea is an English reptile; it abounds in Germany and Switzerland.

It is to be remembered that the salamandra aquatica 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
salamandra 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 bides, 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 to misunderstand his meaning, I shall give it in
his own words. Speaking of the opercula or covering to the gills of the
mud inguana, he proceeds to say that ‘The forms of these pennated
coverings approach 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 at what Mr. Ellis advances more
than once.

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
(anguis 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 twenty-seventh 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
maturity 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 ever happens. The serpent kind eat, I
believe, but once in a year; or rather, but only just at one season of
the year. Country people talk much of a water-snake, but I am pretty
sure, without any reason; for the common snake (coluber natrix)
delights 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 by the various species, or rather varieties, of
our lacerti, of which Ray enumerates five. I have not had an
opportunity 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.




Letter XVIII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, July 27, 1768.

Dear Sir,

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, but could find no such
fish as the gasterosteus pungitius: he found the gasterosteus aculeatus
in plenty. This morning, in a basket, I packed a little earthen pot
full of wet moss, and in it some sticklebacks, male and female; the
females big with spawn: some lamperns; some bull’s heads; but I could
produce no minnows. This basket will be in Fleet-street by eight this
evening; so I hope 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 Ambresbury, I sent a servant over to that town, and
procured several diving specimens of loaches, which he brought, safe
and brisk, in a glass decanter. They 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 collections of small black dots, not reaching
much below the linea lateralis, as are the back and tail fins: a black
line runs from each eye down to the nose; its belly is of a silvery
white; the upper jaw projects beyond the lower, and is surrounded with
six feelers, 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
characteristic 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, and did not forget to
make some inquiries concerning 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
invalidate 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 clergyman; who, after expressing
compassion for her situation, told her chat 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 me)
having set up for a cancer-doctress, finds it expedient to amuse the
country with this dark and mysterious relation.

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. Not that this circumstance at all invalidates
the assertion that they are larvae: for the larvae of insects are full
of eggs, which they exclude the instant they enter their last state.
The water-eft 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 colour; and some
have fins up their tail and back, and some have not.




Letter XIX


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Aug. 17, 1768.

Dear Sir,

I have now, past dispute, made out three distinct species of the
willow-wrens (motacillae 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 April the 18th, I
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 two
other, 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 the 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-coloured 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
cristatus of Ray, which he says ‘cantat voce stridula locustae.’ Yet
this great ornithologist never suspected that there were three species.

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




Letter XX


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, October 8, 1768.

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. Several birds, which are said to belong to the north only,
are, it seems, often in the south. I have discovered 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-backed butcher bird, lanius collurio. 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 the legs
and wings of beetles.

The next rare birds (which were procured for me last week) were some
ring-ousels, turdi torquati.

This week twelve months a gentleman from London, being with us, was
amusing himself with a gun, and found, he told us, on an old yew hedge
where 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 letter of November
the 4th, 1767 (you, however, paid but small regard to what I said, as I
had not seen these birds myself); but 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 again last spring, about Lady-day, as it were, on
their return to the north. Now perhaps these ousels are not the ousels
of the north of England, but belong to the more northern parts of
Europe; and may retire before the excessive rigour of the frosts in
those parts; and return to breed in the spring, when the cold abates.
If this be the case, here is discovered a new bird of winter passage,
concerning whose migrations the writers are silent: but if these birds
should prove the ousels of the north of England, then here is a
migration disclosed within our own kingdom 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 usually 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 so lately on the study 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 belly. 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 to corroborate my suspicions; and I hope Mr. … 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.




Letter XXI


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Nov. 28, 1768.

Dear Sir,

With regard to the oedicnemus, or stone curlew, I intend to write very
soon to my friend near Chichester, in whose neighbourhood these birds
seem most to abound; and shall urge him to take particular notice when
they begin to congregate, and afterwards 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 my history of the stone curlew; which I hope will
prove to your satisfaction, as it will be, I trust, very near the
truth. This gentleman, as he occupies a large farm of his own, and is
abroad early and late, will be a very proper spy upon the motions of
these birds: and besides, as I have prevailed on him to buy the
Naturalist’s Journal (with which he is much delighted), I shall expect
that he will be very exact in his dates. It is very extraordinary, as
you observe, that a bird so common with us should never straggle to
you.

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 monedulae) build every year 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 suspected 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 mankind
towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate any
thing from common report, especially in print, without expressing some
degree of doubt and suspicion.

Your approbation, with regard to my new discovery of the migration of
the ring-ousel, gives me satisfaction; and I find you concur with me in
suspecting that they are foreign birds which visit us. You will be
sure, I hope, not to omit to make inquiry 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 ichthyology. If fortune had
settled me near the sea-side, or near some great river, my natural
propensity 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 farther than
to those common sorts which our brooks and lakes produce.

I am, etc.




Letter XXII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, July 2, 1769.

Dear Sir,

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 appearance than dovecots. When I first saw
Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, and the fens of
Lincolnshire, I was amazed at the number of spires which presented
themselves in every point of view. As an admirer of prospects, I have
reason to lament this want in my 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 of things in the
sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed, of mankind.’*

* James, chap. iii. 7.


It is a satisfaction to me to find that a green lizard has actually
been procured for you in Devonshire; 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 acquainted with the south
hams of Devonshire; and can suppose that district, from its southerly
situation, 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 suspicions that those which visit this
neighbourhood about Michaelmas are not English birds, but 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 your account 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 could never manage to
see. Fourscore nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I
would ride half as many miles to have a sight of. Pray be sure to tell
me in your next whose seat Cressi-hall is, and near what town it lies.*
I have often thought that those vast extents of fens have never been
sufficiently explored. If half a dozen gentlemen, furnished with a good
strength of water-spaniels, were to beat them over for a week, they
would certainly find more species.

* Cressi-hall is near Spalding, in Lincolnshire.


There is no bird, I believe, whose manners I have studied more than
that of the caplimulgus (the goat-sucker), as 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 an 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 organic
impulse, by the powers of the parts of its windpipe, formed for sound,
just as cats pur. You will credit me, I hope, when I tell you that, as
my neighbours were assembled in an hermitage on the side of a steep
hill where we drink tea, one of these churn-owls came and settled on
the cross of that little straw edifice and began to chatter, and
continued his note for many minutes: and we were all struck with wonder
to find that the organs of that little animal, when put in motion, gave
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.

It would not be at all strange if your bat, which you have procured,
should prove a new one, since five species have been found in a
neighbouring kingdom. 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 entertaining. I am no angler
myself; but inquiring of those 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 entomology, 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 we have had delicate weather. Mr. Barker, who has measured the
rain for more than thirty years, says, in a late letter, that more has
fallen this year than in any he ever attended to; though, from July
1763 to January 1764, more fell than in any seven months of this year.




Letter XXIII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, February 28, 1769.

Dear Sir,

It is not improbable that the Guernsey lizard and our green lizard 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 circumstance 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 send me word 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 that we accorded so well about the
caprimulgus: all I contended for was to prove that it often chatters
sitting as well as flying; 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
(hirundines rusticae) clustering on the stinted 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 sea: after this I did
not see any more flocks, only now and then a straggler.

I cannot agree with those persons that assert that the swallow kind
disappear some and some gradually, as they come, for the bulk of them
seem to withdraw at once: only some stragglers stay behind a long
while, and do never, there is the greatest 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 it
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 delight to observe with how
much ardour and punctuality those poor little birds obeyed the strong
impulse towards migration, or hiding, imprinted on their minds by their
great Creator; and with some degree of mortification, when I reflected
that, after all our pains and inquiries, we are yet not quite certain
to what regions they do migrate; and are still farther embarrassed to
find that some do not actually 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.




Letter XXIV


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, May 29, 1769.

Dear Sir,

The scarabaeus 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 thirteenth 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 perhaps 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 condition. The hen had but very small rudiments
of eggs within her, which proves they are late breeders; whereas those
species of the thrush kind that remain with us the whole year have
fledged young 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 make but a few
days’ stay in their spring visit, but rest near a fortnight at
Michaelmas. These birds, from the observations of three springs and two
autumns, are most punctual in their return; and 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
examination, it answered much better to the description of that species
which you shot at Revesby, in Lincolnshire. My bird I describe thus:
‘It is a size less than the grasshopper-lark; the head, back, and
coverts of the wings of a dusky brown, without those dark spots of the
grasshopper-lark; over each eye is a milk-white 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
further inquiry. For my part, I suspect it is a second sort of
locustella, hinted at by Dr. Derham in Ray’s Letters: see p. 108. He
also procured me a grasshopper-lark.

* For this salicaria see letter August 30, 1769.


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 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.’

To Thomas Pennant, Esquire

The Naturalist’s Summer-evening Walk

… equidem credo, quia sit divinitus illis
Ingenium.


VIRG. GEORG.


When day declining sheds a milder gleam,
What time the may-fly[1] 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[2] cuckoo’s tale,
To hear the clamorous[3] 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, unsubdu’d of wing:
Amusive birds!—say where your hid retreat
When the frost rages and the tempests beat;
Whence 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 dor come brushing by
With buzzing wing, or the shrill[4] 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’ awakened 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[5] 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 glow-worm lights her amorous fire![6]
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.[7]

I am, etc.

[1] The angler’s may-fly, the ephemera vulgata Linn., comes forth from
its aurelia state, and emerges out of the water about six in the
evening, and dies about eleven at night, determining the date of its
fly state in about five or six hours. They usually begin to appear
about the 4th of June, and continue in succession for near a fortnight.
See Swammerdam, Derham, Scopoli, etc.


[2] Vagrant cuckoo; so called because, being tied down by no incubation
or attendance about the nutrition of its young, it wanders without
control.


[3] Charadrius aedicnemus.


[4] Gryllus campetris.


[5] In hot summer nights woodlarks soar to a prodigious height, and
hang singing in the air


[6] The light of the female glow-worm (as she often crawls up the stalk
of a grass to make herself more conspicuous) is a signal to the male,
which is a slender dusky scarabaeus.


[7] See the story of Hero and Leander.)




Letter XXV


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Aug. 30, 1769.

Dear Sir,

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 history, I should pass over this
query just as the sly commentator does over a crabbed passage in a
classic; but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without
some degree of shame, that I only reasoned 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 I have
good reason to suspect since that they may come to us from westward;
because 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 eye, 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 no more nor less than the passer arundinaceus minor of Ray.
This bird, by some means or other, seems to be entirely omitted in the
British Zoology; and one reason probably was because it is so strangely
classed in Ray, who ranges it among his picis affines. It ought no
doubt to have gone among his aviculae cauda unicolore, and among your
slender-billed small birds of the same division. Linnaeus might with
great propriety have put it into his genus of motacilla; and the
motacilla salicaria 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 description of
your fen salicaria, shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent
characteristic of it when he says, ‘Rostrum & pedes in hac avicula
multo majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione.’ See letter May 29, 1769.

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 inadvertently 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 have of stinking se defendendo. I knew
a gentleman who kept a tame snake, which was in its person as sweet as
any animal while in a 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 squnck, or stonck, of Ray’s Synop. Ouadr. is an innocuous and
sweet animal; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such
a pestilent and fetid smell and excrement, that nothing can be more
horrible.

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




Letter XXVI


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, December 8, 1769.

Dear Sir,

I was much gratified by your communicative letter 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
themselves 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 dispatch, than as philosophers investigating the works of
nature. You must have made, no doubt, many discoveries, 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 field-fares, 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 circumstance 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 autumn 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 30th 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 congeners
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 fortnight at
Michaelmas, and again for about a week in the middle 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-fleck, 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 begin
to suspect that these are some stragglers of the birds we are talking
of, which sometimes perhaps may rove so far to the southward.

It pleases me to find that white hares are so frequent 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 that 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 Buffon, 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 on 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 hybernaculum artificially formed of grass and leaves. At one end
of the burrow lay above a gallon of potatoes regularly stowed, on which
it was to have supported itself for the winter. But the difficulty with
me is how this amphibius mus came to fix its winter 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 were planted there;
or is it the constant practice of the aquatic rat to forsake the
neighbourhood of the water in the colder months?

Though I delight very little in analogous reasoning, knowing how
fallacious it is with respect to natural 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 apus, 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 by is at present a nondescript in
England, and what I have never been able yet to procure) retires and
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 water. From hence I would conclude
that these hirundines, and the larger bats, are supported by some sorts
of high-flying gnats, scarabs, or phalaenae, that are of short
continuance; and that the short stay of these strangers is regulated by
the defect of their food.

* The little bat appears almost every month in the year; but I have
never seen the large ones till the end of April, nor after July. They
are most common in June, but never in any plenty; are a rare species
with us.


By my journal it appears that curlews clamoured on to October the
thirty-first; since which I have not seen or heard any. Swallows were
observed on to November the third.




Letter XXVII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Feb. 22, 1770.

Dear Sir,

Hedge-hogs abound in my gardens and fields. The manner in which they
eat their roots of the plantain in my grass-walks is very curious: with
their upper mandible, which is much longer than their lower, they bore
under the plant, and so eat the root off upwards, leaving the tuft of
leaves untouched. In this respect they are serviceable, as they destroy
a very troublesome weed; but they deface the waffles in some measure by
digging little round holes. It appears, by the dung that they drop upon
the turf, that beetles are no inconsiderable part of their food. In
June last I procured a litter of four or five young hedge-hogs, which
appeared to be about five or six days old; they, I find, like puppies,
are born blind, and could not see when they came to my hands. No doubt
their spines are soft and flexible at the time of their birth, or else
the poor dam would have but a bad time of it in the critical moment of
parturition: but it is plain that they soon harden; for these little
pigs had such stiff prickles on their backs and sides as would easily
have fetched blood, had they not been handled with caution. Their
spines are quite white at this age; and they have little hanging ears,
which I do not remember to be discernible in the old ones. They can, in
part, at this age draw their skin down over their faces; but are not
able to contract themselves into a ball as they do, for the sake of
defence, when full grown. The reason, I suppose, is, because the
curious muscle that enables the creature to roll itself up into a ball
was not then arrived at its full tone and firmness. Hedge-hogs make a
deep and warm hybernaculum with leaves and moss, in which they conceal
themselves for the winter: but I never could find that they stored in
any winter provision, as some quadrupeds certainly do.

I have discovered an anecdote with respect to the field-fare (turdus
pilaris), which I think is particular enough: this bird, though it sits
on trees in the day-time, and procures the greatest part of its food
from white-thorn hedges; yea, moreover, builds on very high trees; as
may be seen by the Fauna Suecica; yet always appears with us to roost
on the ground. They are seen to come in flocks just before it is dark,
and to settle and nestle among the heath on our forest. And besides,
the larkers, in dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them in
the wheat-stubbles; while the bat-fowlers, who take many red-wings in
the hedges, never entangle any of this species. Why these birds, in the
matter of roosting, should differ from all their congeners, and from
themselves also with respect to their proceedings by day, is a fact for
which I am by no means able to account.

I have somewhat to inform you of concerning the moose-deer; but in
general foreign animals fall seldom in my way; my little intelligence
is confined to the narrow sphere of my own observations at home.




Letter XXVIII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, March, 1770.

On Michaelmas-day 1768 I managed to get a sight of the female moose
belonging to the Duke of Richmond, at Goodwood; but was greatly
disappointed, when I arrived at the spot, to find that it died, after
having appeared in a languishing way for some time, on the morning
before. However, understanding that it was not stripped, I proceeded to
examine this rare quadruped: I found it in an old green-house, slung
under the belly and chin by ropes, and in a standing posture; but,
though it had been dead for so short a time, it was in so putrid a
state that the stench was hardly supportable. The grand distinction
between this deer, and any other species that I have ever met with,
consisted in the strange length of its legs; on which it was tilted up
much in the manner of birds of the grallae order. I measured it, as
they do an horse, and found that, from the ground to the wither, it was
just five feet four inches; which height answers exactly to sixteen
hands, a growth that few horses arrive at: but then, with this length
of legs, its neck was remarkably short, no more than twelve inches; so
that, by straddling with one foot forward and the other backward, it
grazed on the plain ground, with the greatest difficulty, between its
legs: the ears were vast and lopping, and as long as the neck; the head
was about twenty inches long, and ass-like; and had such a redundancy
of upper lip as I never saw before, with huge nostrils. This lip,
travellers say, is esteemed a dainty dish in North America. It is very
reasonable to suppose that this creature supports itself chiefly by
browsing of trees, and by wading after water-plants; towards which way
of livelihood the length of leg and great lip must contribute much. I
have read somewhere that it delights in eating the nymphaea, or
water-lily. From the fore-feet to the belly behind the shoulder it
measured three feet and eight inches: the length of the legs before and
behind consisted a great deal in the tibia, which was strangely long;
but in my haste to get out of the stench, I forgot to measure that
joint exactly. Its scut seemed to be about an inch long; the colour was
a grizzly black; the mane about four inches long; the fore-hoofs were
upright and shapely, the hind flat and splayed. The spring before it
was only two years old, so that most probably it was not then come to
its growth. What a vast tall beast must a full-grown stag be! I have
been told some arrive at ten feet and an half! This poor creature had
at first a female companion of the same species, which died the spring
before. In the same garden was a young stag, or red deer, between whom
and this moose it was hoped that there might have been a breed; but
their inequality of height must have always been a bar to any commerce
of the amorous kind. I should have been glad to have examined the
teeth, tongue, lips, hoofs, etc., minutely; but the putrefaction
precluded all further curiosity. This animal, the keeper told me,
seemed to enjoy itself best in the extreme frost of the former winter.
In the house they showed me the horn of a male moose, which had no
front-antlers, but only a broad palm with some snags on the edge. The
noble owner of the dead moose proposed to make a skeleton of her bones.

Please to let me hear if my female moose corresponds with that you saw;
and whether you think still that the American moose and European elk
are the same creature.

I am,

With the greatest esteem. etc.




Letter XXIX


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, May 12, 1770.

Dear Sir,

Last month we had such a series of cold turbulent weather, such a
constant succession of frost, and snow, and hail, and tempest, that the
regular migration or appearance of the summer birds was much
interrupted. Some did not show themselves (at least were not heard)
till weeks after their usual time; as the black-cap and white-throat;
and some have not been heard yet, as the grasshopper-lark and largest
willow-wren. As to the fly-catcher, I have not seen it; it is indeed
one of the latest, but should appear about this time: and yet, amidst
all this meteorous strife and war of the elements, two swallows
discovered themselves as long ago as the eleventh of April, in frost
and snow; but they withdrew quickly, and were not visible again for
many days. House-martins, which are always more backward than swallows,
were not observed till May came in.

Among the monogamous birds several are to be found, after pairing-time,
single, and of each sex: but whether this state of celibacy is matter
of choice or necessity, is not so easily discoverable. When the
house-sparrows deprive my martins of their nests, as soon as I cause
one to be shot, the other, be it cock or hen, presently procures a
mate, and so for several times following.

I have known a dove-house infested by a pair of white owls, which made
great havoc among the young pigeons: one of the owls was shot as soon
as possible; but the survivor readily found a mate, and the mischief
went on. After some time the new pair were both destroyed, and the
annoyance ceased.

Another instance I remember of a sportsman, whose zeal for the increase
of his game being greater than his humanity, after pairing-time he
always shot the cock-bird of every couple of partridges upon his
grounds; supposing that the rivalry of many males interrupted the
breed: he used to say, that, though he had widowed the same hen several
times, yet he found she was still provided with a fresh paramour, that
did not take her away from her usual haunt.

Again; I knew a lover of setting, an old sportsman, who has often told
me that soon after harvest he has frequently taken small coveys of
partridges, consisting of cock-birds alone; these he pleasantly used to
call old bachelors.

There is a propensity belonging to common house-cats that is very
remarkable; I mean their violent fondness for fish, which appears to be
their most favourite food: and yet nature in this instance seems to
have planted in them an appetite that, unassisted, they know not how to
gratify: for of all quadrupeds cats are the least disposed towards
water; and will not, when they can avoid it, deign to wet a foot, much
less to plunge into that element.

Quadrupeds that prey on fish are amphibious: such is the otter, which
by nature is so well formed for diving, that it makes great havoc among
the inhabitants of the waters. Not supposing that we had any of those
beasts in our shadow brooks, I was much pleased to see a male otter
brought to me, weighing twenty-one pounds, that had been shot on the
bank of our stream below the Priory, where the rivulet divides the
parish of Selborne from Harteley-wood.




Letter XXX


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Aug. 1, 1770.

Dear Sir,

The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural
history. What Linnaeus says with respect to insects holds good in every
other branch: ‘Verbositas praesentis saeculi, calamitas artis.’

Pray how do you approve of Scopoli’s new work? As I admire his
Entomologia, I long to see it.

I forgot to mention in my last letter (and had not room to insert in
the former) that the male moose, in rutting time, swims from island to
island, in the lakes and rivers of North America, in pursuit of the
females. My friend, the chaplain, saw one killed in the water as it was
on that errand in the river St. Lawrence: it was a monstrous beast, he
told me; but he did not take the dimensions.

When I was last in town our friend Mr. Barrington most obligingly
carried me to see many curious sights. As you were then writing to him
about horns, he carried me to see many strange and wonderful specimens.
There is, I remember, at Lord Pembroke’s, at Wilton, an horn room
furnished with more than thirty different pairs; but I have not seen
that house lately.

Mr. Barrington showed me many astonishing collections of stuffed and
living birds from all quarters of the world. After I had studied over
the latter for a time, I remarked that every species almost that came
from distant regions, such as South America, the coast of Guinea, etc.,
were thick-billed birds of the loxia and fringilla genera; and no
motacillae, or muscicapae, were to be met with. When I came to
consider, the reason was obvious enough; for the hard-billed birds
subsist on seeds, which are easily carried on board; while the
soft-billed birds, which are supported by worms and insects, or, what
is a succedaneum for them, fresh raw meat, can meet with neither in
long and tedious voyages. It is from this defect of food that our
collections (curious as they are) are defective, and we are deprived of
some of the most delicate and lively genera.

I am, etc.




Letter XXXI


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Sept. 14, 1770.

Dear Sir,

You saw, I find, the ring-ousels again among their native crags; and
are farther assured that they continue resident in those cold regions
the whole year. From whence, then, do our ring-ousels migrate so
regularly every September, and make their appearance again, as if in
their return, every April? They are more early this year than common,
for some were seen at the usual hill on the fourth of this month.

An observing Devonshire gentleman tells me that they frequent some
parts of Dartmoor, and breed there; but leave those haunts about the
end of September or beginning of October, and return again about the
end of March.

Another intelligent person assures me that they breed in great
abundance all over the Peak of Derby, and are called there tor-ousels;
withdraw in October and November, and return in spring. This
information seems to throw some light on my new migration.

Scopoli’s* new work (which I have just procured) has its merits in
ascertaining many of the birds of the Tirol and Carniola. Monographers,
come from whence they may, have, I think, fair presence to challenge
some regard and approbation from the lovers of natural history; for, as
no man can alone investigate all the works of nature, these partial
writers may, each in their department, be more accurate in their
discoveries, and freer from errors, than more general writers; and so
by degrees may pave the way to an universal correct natural history.
Not that Scopoli is so circumstantial and attentive to the life and
conversation of his birds as I could wish: he advances some false
facts; as when he says of the hirundo urbica that ‘pullos extra nidum
non nutrit.’ This assertion I know to be wrong from repeated
observations this summer, for house-martins do feed their young flying,
though it must be acknowledged not so commonly as the house-swallow;
and the feat is done in so quick a manner as not to be perceptible to
indifferent observers. He also advances some (I was going to say)
improbable facts; as when he says of the woodcock that, ‘pullos rostra
portat fugiens ab hoste.’ But candour forbids me to say absolutely that
any fact is false, because I have never been witness to such a fact. I
have only to remark that the long unwieldy bill of the woodcock is
perhaps the worst adapted of any among the winged creation for such a
feat of natural affection.

* Annus Primus Historico-Naturalis.


I am, etc.




Letter XXXII


T Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, October 29, 1770.

Dear Sir,

After an ineffectual search in Linnaeus, Brisson, etc., I begin to
suspect that I discern my brother’s hirundo hyberna in Scopoli’s new
discovered hirundo rupestris, p. 167. His description of ‘Supra murina,
subtus albida; rectrices macula ovali alba in latere inferno; pedes
nudi, nigri; rostrum nigrum; remiges obscuriores quam plumae dorsales;
rectrices remigibus concolores; cauda emarginata, nec forcipata,’
agrees very well with the bird in question; but when he comes to
advance that it is ‘statura hirundinis urbicae,’ and that ‘definitio
hirundinis ripariae Linnaei huic quoque convenit,’ he in some measure
invalidates all he has said; at least he shows at once that he compares
them to these species merely from memory: for I have compared the birds
themselves, and find they differ widely in every circumstance of shape,
size, and colour. However, as you will have a specimen, I shall be glad
to hear what your judgment is in the matter.

Whether my brother is forestalled in his nondescript or not, he will
have the credit of first discovering that they spend their winters
under the warm and sheltery shores of Gibraltar and Barbary.

Scopoli’s characters of his ordines and genera are clear, just, and
expressive, and much in the spirit of Linnaeus. These few remarks are
the result of my first perusal of Scopoli’s Annus Primus.

The bane of our science is the comparing one animal to the other by
memory: for want of caution in this particular, Scopoli falls into
errors: he is not so full with regard to the manners of his indigenous
birds as might be wished, as you justly observe: his Latin is easy,
elegant, and expressive, and very superior to Kramer’s.*

* See his Elenchus vegerabilium et animalium per Austriam inferiorem,
etc.


I am pleased to see that my description of the moose corresponds so
well with yours.

I am, etc.




Letter XXXIII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Nov. 26, 1770.

Dear Sir,

I was much pleased to see, among the collection of birds from
Gibraltar, some of those short-winged English summer birds of passage,
concerning whose departure we have made so much inquiry. Now if these
birds are found in Andalusia to migrate to and from Barbary, it may
easily be supposed that those that come to us may migrate back to the
continent, and spend their winters in some of the warmer parts of
Europe. This is certain, that many soft-billed birds that come to
Gibraltar appear there only in spring and autumn, seeming to advance in
pairs towards the northward, for the sake of breeding during the summer
months; and retiring in parties and broods towards the south at the
decline of the year: so that the rock of Gibraltar is the great
rendezvous, and place of observation, from whence they take their
departure each way towards Europe or Africa. It is therefore no mean
discovery, I think, to find that our small short-winged summer birds of
passage are to be seen spring and autumn on the very skirts of Europe;
it is a presumptive proof of their emigrations.

Scopoli seems to me to have found the hirundo melba, the great
Gibraltar swift, in Tirol, without knowing it. For what is his hirundo
alpina but the afore-mentioned bird in other words? Says he, ‘Omnia
prioris’ (meaning the swift); ‘sed pectus album; paulo major priore.’ I
do not suppose this to be a new species. It is true also of the melba,
that ‘nidificat in excelsis Alpium rupibus.’ Vid. Annum Primum.

My Sussex friend, a man of observation and good sense, but no
naturalist, to whom I applied on account of the stone curlew,
oedicnemus, sends me the following account: ‘In looking over my
Naturalist’s Journal for the month of April, I find the stone curlews
are first mentioned on the seventeenth and eighteenth, which date seems
to me rather late. They live with us all the spring and summer and at
the beginning of autumn prepare to take leave by getting together in
flocks. They seem to me a bird of passage that may travel into some dry
hilly country south of us, probably Spain, because of the abundance of
sheep-walks in that country; for they spend their summers with us in
such districts. This conjecture I hazard, as I have never met with any
one that has seen them in England in the winter. I believe they are not
fond of going near the water, but feed on earth-worms, that are common
on sheep-walks and downs. They breed on fallows and lay-fields
abounding with grey mossy flints, which much resemble their young in
colour; among which they skulk and conceal themselves. They make no
nest, but lay their eggs on the bare ground, producing in common but
two at a time. There is reason to think their young run soon after they
are hatched; and that the old ones do not feed them, but only lead them
about at the time of feeding, which, for the most part, is in the
night.’ Thus far my friend.

In the manners of this bird you see there is something very analogous
to the bustard, whom it also somewhat resembles in aspect and make, and
in the structure of its feet.

For a long time I have desired my relation to look out for these birds
in Andalusia; and now he writes me word that, for the first time, he
saw one dead in the market on the 3rd of September.

When the oedicnemus flies it stretches out its legs straight behind,
like an heron.

I am, etc.




Letter XXXIV


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, March 30, 1771.

Dear Sir,

There is an insect with us, especially on chalky districts, which is
very troublesome and teasing all the latter end of the summer, getting
into people’s skins, especially those of women and children, and
raising tumours which itch intolerably. This animal (which we call an
harvest-bug) is very minute, scarce discernible to the naked eye; of a
bright scarlet colour, and of the genus of Acarus. They are to to be
met with in gardens on kidney-beans, or any legumens; but prevail only
in the hot months of summer. Warreners, as some have assured me, are
much infested by them on chalky downs; where these insects swarm
sometimes to so infinite a degree as to discolour their nets, and to
give them a reddish cast, while the men are so bitten as to be thrown
into fevers.

There is a small long shining fly in these parts very troublesome to
the housewife, by getting into the chimneys, and laying its eggs in the
bacon while it is drying: these eggs produce maggots called jumpers,
which, harbouring in the gammons and best parts of the hogs, eat down
to the bone, and make great waste. This fly I suspect to be a variety
of the musca putris of Linnaeus: it is to be seen in the summer in the
farm-kitchens on the bacon-racks and about the mantelpieces, and on the
ceilings.

The insect that infests turnips and many crops in the garden
(destroying often whole fields while in their seedling leaves) is an
animal that wants to be better known. The country people here call it
the turnip-fly and black dolphin; but I know it to be one of the
coleoptera; the ‘chrysomela oleracea, saltatoria, femoribus posficis
crassissimis.’ In very hot summers they abound to an amazing degree,
and as you walk in a field or in a garden, make a pattering like rain,
by jumping on the leaves of the turnips or cabbages.

There is an oestrus, known in these parts to every ploughboy; which,
because it is omitted by Linnaeus, is also passed over by late writers,
and that is the curvicauda of old Moufet, mentioned by Derham in his
Physico-theology, p. 250: an insect worthy of remark for depositing its
eggs as it flies in so dexterous a manner on the single hairs of the
legs and flanks of grass-horses. But then Derham is mistaken when he
advances that this oestrus is the parent of that wonderful star-tailed
maggot which he mentions afterwards; for more modern entomologists have
discovered that singular production to be derived from the egg of the
musca chamaeleon: see Geoffrey, t. 17, f. 4.

A full history of noxious insects hurtful in the field, garden, and
house, suggesting all the known and likely means of destroying them,
would be allowed by the public to be a most useful and important work.
What knowledge there is of this sort lies scattered, and wants to be
collected; great improvements would soon follow of course. A knowledge
of the properties, oeconomy, propagation, and in short of the life and
conversation of these animals, is a necessary step to lead us to some
method of preventing their depredations.

As far as I am a judge, nothing would recommend entomology more than
some neat plates that should well express the generic distinctions of
insects according to Linnaeus; for I am well assured that many people
would study insects, could they set out with a more adequate notion of
those distinctions that can be conveyed at first by words alone.




Letter XXXV


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, 1771.

Dear Sir,

Happening to make a visit to my neighbour’s peacocks, I could not help
observing that the trains of those magnificent birds appear by no means
to be their tails; those long feathers growing not from their
uropygium, but all up their backs. A range of short brown stiff
feathers, about six inches long, fixed in the uropygium, is the real
tail, and serves as the fulcrum to prop the train, which is long and
top-heavy, when set on end. When the train is up, nothing appears of
the bird before but its head and neck, but this would not be the case
were those long feathers fixed only in the rump, as may be seen by the
turkey-cock when in a strutting attitude. By a strong muscular
vibration these birds can make the shafts of their long feathers
clatter like the swords of a sword-dancer; they then trample very quick
with their feet, and run backwards towards the females.

I should tell you that I have got an uncommon calculus aegogropila,
taken out of the stomach of a fat ox; it is perfectly round, and about
the size of a large Seville orange; such are, I think, usually flat.




Letter XXXVI


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Sept. 1771.

Dear Sir,

The summer through I have seen but two of that large species of bat
which I call vespertilio altivolans, from its manner of feeding high in
the air: I procured one of them, and found it to be a male; and made no
doubt, as they accompanied together, that the other was a female: but,
happening in an evening or two to procure the other likewise, I was
somewhat disappointed, when it appeared to be also of the same sex.
This circumstance, and the great scarcity of this sort, at least in
these parts, occasions some suspicions in my mind whether it is really
a species, or whether it may not be the male part of the more known
species, one of which may supply many females; as is known to be the
case in sheep, and some other quadrupeds. But this doubt can only be
cleared by a farther examination, and some attention to the sex, of
more specimens: all that I know at present is, that my two were amply
furnished with the parts of generation, much resembling those of a
boar.

In the extent of their wings they measured fourteen inches and an half,
and four inches and an half from the nose to the tip of the tail; their
heads were large, their nostrils bilobated, their shoulders broad and
muscular, and their whole bodies fleshy and plump. Nothing could be
more sleek and soft than their fur, which was of a bright chestnut
colour; their maws were full of food, but so macerated that the quality
could not be distinguished; their livers, kidneys, and hearts were
large, and their bowels covered with fat. They weighed each, when
entire, full one ounce and one drachm. Within the ear there was
somewhat of a peculiar structure that I did not understand perfectly;
but refer it to the observation of the curious anatomist. These
creatures send forth a vary rancid and offensive smell.




Letter XXXVII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, 1771.

Dear Sir,

On the twelfth of July I had a fair opportunity of contemplating the
motions of the caprimulgus, or fern-owl, as it was playing round a
large oak that swarmed with scarabaei solstitiales, or fern-chafers.
The powers of its wing were wonderful, exceeding, if possible, the
various evolutions and quick turns of the swallow genus. But the
circumstance that pleased me most was that I saw it distinctly, more
than once, put out its short leg while on the wing, and, by a bend of
the head, deliver somewhat into its mouth. If it takes any part of its
prey with its foot, as I have now the greatest reason to suppose it
does these chafers, I no longer wonder at the use of its middle toe,
which is curiously furnished with a serrated claw.

Swallows and martins, the bulk of them, I mean, have forsaken us sooner
this year than usual; for, on September the twenty-second, they
rendezvoused in a neighbour’s walnut-tree, where it seemed probable
they had taken up their lodging for the night. At the dawn of the day,
which was foggy, they arose all together in infinite numbers,
occasioning such a rushing from the strokes of their wings against the
hazy air, as might be heard to a considerable distance: since that no
flock has appeared, only a few stragglers.

Some swifts staid late, till the twenty-second of August —a rare
instance! for they usually withdraw within the first week.*

* See Letter LIII to Mr. Barrington.


On September the twenty-fourth three or four ring-ousels appeared in my
fields for the first time this season: how punctual are these visitors
in their autumns and spring migrations!




Letter XXXVIII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, March 15, 1773.

Dear Sir,

By my journal for last autumn it appears that the house-martins bred
very late, and staid very late in these parts; for, on the first of
October, I saw young martins in their nests nearly fledged; and again,
on the twenty-first of October, we had at the next house a nest full of
young martins just ready to fly; and the old ones were hawking for
insects with great alertness. The next morning the brood forsook their
nest, and were flying round the village. From this day I never saw one
of the swallow kind till November the third; when twenty, or perhaps
thirty, house-martins were playing all day long by the side of the
hanging wood, and over my fields. Did these small weak birds, some of
which were nestlings twelve days ago, shift their quarters at this late
season of the year to the other side of the northern tropic? Or rather,
is it not more probable that the next church, ruin, chalk-cliff, steep
covert, or perhaps sandbank, lake or pool (as a more northern
naturalist would say), may become their hybernaculum, and afford them a
ready and obvious retreat?

We now begin to expect our vernal migration of ring-ousels every week.
Persons worthy of credit assure me that ring-ousels were seen at
Christmas 1770 in the forest of Bere, on the southern verge of this
county. Hence we may conclude that their migrations are only internal,
and not extended to the continent southward, if they do at first come
at all from the northern parts of this island only, and not from the
north of Europe. Come from whence they will, it is plain, from the
fearless disregard that they show for men or guns, that they have been
little accustomed to places of much resort. Navigators mention that in
the Isle of Ascension, and other such desolate districts, birds are so
little acquainted with the human form that they settle on men’s
shoulders; and have no more dread of a sailor than they would have of a
goat that was grazing. A young man at Lewes, in Sussex, assured me that
about seven years ago ring-ousels abounded so about that town in the
autumn that he killed sixteen himself in one afternoon: he added
farther, that some had appeared since in every autumn; but he could not
find that any had been observed before the season in which he shot so
many. I myself have found these birds in little parties in the autumn
cantoned all along the Sussex-downs, wherever there were shrubs and
bushes, from Chichester to Lewes; particularly in the autumn of 1770.

I am, etc.




Letter XXXIX


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Nov. 9, 1773.

Dear Sir,

As you desire me to send you such observations as may occur, I take the
liberty of making the following remarks, that you may, according as you
think me right or wrong, admit or reject what I here advance, in your
intended new edition of the British Zoology.

The osprey was shot about a year ago at Frinshampond, a great lake, at
about six miles from hence, while it was sitting on the handle of a
plough and devouring a fish: it used to precipitate itself into the
water, and so take its prey by surprise.

A great ash-coloured butcher-bird was shot last winter in Tisted-park,
and a red-backed butcher-bird at Selborne: they are rarae aves in this
country.

Crows go in pairs the whole year round.

Cornish choughs abound, and breed on Beachy-head and on all the cliffs
of the Sussex coast.

The common wild-pigeon, or stock-dove, is a bird of passage in the
south of England, seldom appearing till towards the end of November; is
usually the latest winter bird of passage. Before our beechen woods
were so much destroyed we had myriads of them, reaching in strings for
a mile together as they went out in a morning to feed. They leave us
early in spring; where do they breed?

The people of Hampshire and Sussex call the missel-bird the storm-cock,
because it sings early in the spring in blowing showery weather; its
song often commences with the year: with us it builds much in orchards.

A gentleman assures me that he has taken the nests of ring-ousels on
Dartmoor: they build in banks on the sides of streams.

Titlarks not only sing sweetly as they sit on trees, but also as they
play and toy about on the wing; and particularly while they are
descending, and sometimes as they stand on the ground.

Adamson’s testimony seems to me to be a very poor evidence that
European swallows migrate during our winter to Senegal: he does not
talk at all like an ornithologist; and probably saw only the swallows
of that country, which I know build within Governor O’Hara’s hall
against the roof. Had he known European swallows, would he not have
mentioned the species ?

The house-swallow washes by dropping into the water as it flies: this
species appears commonly about a week before the house-martin, and
about ten or twelve days before the swift.

In 1772 there were young house-martins in their nest till October the
twenty-third.

The swift appears about ten or twelve days later than the
house-swallow: viz., about the twenty-fourth or twenty-sixth of April.

Whin-chats and stone-chattel stay with us the whole year.

Some wheat-ears continue with us the winter through.

Wagtails, all sorts, remain with us all the winter.

Bullfinches, when fed on hempseed, often become wholly black.

We have vast flocks of female chaffinches all the winter, with hardly
any males among them.

When you say that in breeding-time the cock-snipes make a bleating
noise, and I a drumming (perhaps I should have rather said an humming),
I suspect we mean the same thing. However, while they are playing about
on the wing they certainly make a loud piping with their mouths: but
whether that bleating or humming is ventriloquous, or proceeds from the
motion of their wings, I cannot say; but this I know, that when this
noise happens the bird is always descending, and his wings are
violently agitated.

Soon after the lapwings have done breeding they congregate, and,
leaving the moors and marshes, betake themselves to downs and
sheep-walks.

Two years ago last spring the little auk was found alive and unhurt,
but fluttering and unable to rise, in a lane a few miles from
Alresford, where there is a great lake: it was kept a while, but died.

I saw young teals taken alive in the ponds of Wolmerforest in the
beginning of July last, along with flappers, or young wild-ducks.

Speaking of the swift, that page says ‘its drink the dew’; whereas it
should be ‘it drinks on the wing’; for all the swallow kind sip their
water as they sweep over the face of pools or rivers: like Virgil’s
bees, they drink flying, ‘flumina summa libant.’ In this method of
drinking perhaps this genus may be peculiar.

Of the sedge-bird be pleased to say it sings most part of the night;
its notes are hurrying, but not unpleasing, and imitative of several
birds; as the sparrow, swallow, skylark. When it happens to be silent
in the night, by throwing a stone or clod into the bushes where it sits
you immediately set it a-singing; or in other words, though it slumbers
sometimes, yet as soon as it is awakened it reassumes its song.




Letter XL


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Sept. 2, 1774.

Dear Sir,

Before your letter arrived, and of my own accord, I had been remarking
and comparing the tails of the male and female swallow, and this ere
any young broods appeared; so that there was no danger of confounding
the dams with their pulli: and besides, as they were then always in
pairs, and busied in the employ of nidification, there could be no room
for mistaking the sexes, nor the individuals of different chimneys the
one for the other. From all my observations, it constantly appeared
that each sex has the long feathers in its tail that give it that
forked shape; with this difference, that they are longer in the tail of
the male than in that of the female.

Nightingales, when their young first come abroad, and are helpless,
make a plaintive and a jarring noise: and also a snapping or cracking,
pursuing people along the hedges as they walk: these last sounds seem
intended for menace and defiance.

The grasshopper-lark chirps all night in the height of summer.

Swans turn white the second year, and breed the third.

Weasels prey on moles, as appears by their being sometimes caught in
mole-traps.

Sparrow-hawks sometimes breed in old crows’ nests, and the kestrel in
churches and ruins.

There are supposed to be two sorts of eels in the island of Ely. The
threads sometimes discovered in eels are perhaps their young: the
generation of eels is very dark and mysterious.

Hen-harriers breed on the ground, and seem never to settle on trees.

When red-starts shake their tails they move them horizontally, as dogs
do when they fawn: the tail of a wagtail, when in motion, bobs up and
down like that of a jaded horse.

Hedge-sparrows have a remarkable flirt with their wings in
breeding-time; as soon as frosty mornings come they make a very piping
plaintive noise.

Many birds which become silent about Midsummer reassume their notes
again in September; as the thrush, blackbird, woodlark, willow-wren,
etc.; hence August is by much the most mute month, the spring, summer,
and autumn through. Are birds induced to sing again because the
temperament of autumn resembles that of spring ?

Linnaeus ranges plants geographically; palms inhabit the tropics,
grasses the temperate zones, and mosses and lichens the polar circles;
no doubt animals may be classed in the same manner with propriety.

House-sparrows build under eaves in the spring; as the weather becomes
hotter they get out for coolness, and nest in plum-trees and
apple-trees. These birds have been known sometimes to build in rooks’
nests, and sometimes in the forks of boughs under rooks’ nests.

As my neighbour was housing a rick he observed that his dogs devoured
all the little red mice that they could catch, but rejected the common
mice: and that his cats ate the common mice, refusing the red.

Red-breasts sing all through the spring, summer, and autumn. The reason
that they are called autumn songsters is, because in the two first
seasons their voices are drowned and lost in the general chorus; in the
latter their song becomes distinguishable. Many songsters of the autumn
seem to be the young cock red-breasts of that year: notwithstanding the
prejudices in their favour, they do much mischief in gardens to the
summer-fruits.*

* They eat also the berries of the ivy, the honeysuckle, and the
euonymus europaeus, or spindle-tree.


The titmouse, which early in February begins to make two quaint notes,
like the whetting of a saw, is the marsh titmouse: the great titmouse
sings with three cheerful joyous notes, and begins about the same time.

Wrens sing all the winter through, frost excepted.

House-martins came remarkably late this year both in Hampshire and
Devonshire: is this circumstance for or against either hiding or
migration ?

Most birds drink sipping at intervals; but pigeons take a long
continued draught, like quadrupeds.

Notwithstanding what I have said in a former letter, no grey crows were
ever known to breed on Dartmoor: it was my mistake.

The appearance and flying of the scarabaeus solstitialis, or
fern-chafer, commence with the month of July, and cease about the end
of it. These scarabs are the constant food of caprimulgi, or fern-owls,
through that period. They abound on the chalky downs and in some sandy
districts, but not in the clays.

In the garden of the Black-bear inn in the town of Reading is a stream
or canal running under the stables and out into the fields on the other
side of the road; in this water are many carps, which lie rolling about
in sight, being fed by travellers, who amuse themselves by tossing them
bread: but as soon as the weather grows at all severe these fishes are
no longer seen, because they retire under the stables, where they
remain till the return of spring. Do they lie in a torpid state? if
they do not, how are they supported?

The note of the white-throat, which is continually repeated, and often
attended with odd gesticulations on the wing, is harsh and displeasing.
These birds seem of a pugnacious disposition; for they sing with an
erected crest and attitudes of rivalry and defiance; are shy and wild
in breeding-time, avoiding neighbourhoods, and haunting lonely lanes
and commons; nay even the very tops of the Sussex-downs, where there
are bushes and covert; but in July and August they bring their broods
into gardens and orchards, and make great havoc among the
summer-fruits.

The black-cap has in common a full, sweet, deep, loud and wild pipe;
yet that strain is of short continuance, and his motions are desultory;
but when that bird sits calmly and engages in song in earnest, he pours
forth very sweet, but inward melody, and expresses great variety of
soft and gentle modulations, superior perhaps to those of any of our
warblers, the nightingale excepted.

Black-caps mostly haunt orchards and gardens; while they warble their
throats are wonderfully distended.

The song of the red-start is superior, though somewhat like that of the
white-throat: some birds have a few more notes than others. Sitting
very placidly on the top of a tree in a village, the cock sings from
morning to night: he affects neighbourhoods, and avoids solitude, and
loves to build in orchards and about houses; with us he perches on the
vane of a tall maypole.

The fly-catcher is of all our summer birds the most mute and the most
familiar: it also appears the last of any. It builds in a vine, or a
sweetbriar, against the wall of an house, or in the hole of a wall, or
on the end of a beam or plate, and often close to the post of a door
where people are going in and out all day long. This bird does not make
the least pretension to song, but uses a little inward wailing note
when it thinks its young in danger from cats or other annoyances: it
breeds but once, and retires early.

Selborne parish alone can and has exhibited at times more than half the
birds that are ever seen in all Sweden; the former has produced more
than one hundred and twenty species, the latter only two hundred and
twenty-one. Let me add also that it has shown near half the species
that were ever known in Great Britain.*

* Sweden, 221; Great Britain, 252 species.


On a retrospect, I observe that my long letter carries with it a quaint
and magisterial air, and is very sententious: but, when I recollect
that you requested stricture and anecdote, I hope you will pardon the
didactic manner for the sake of the information it may happen to
contain.




Letter XLI


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


It is matter of curious inquiry to trace out how those species of
soft-billed birds, that continue with us the winter through, subsist
during the dead months. The imbecility of birds seems not to be the
only reason why they shun the rigour of our winters; for the robust
wryneck (so much resembling the hardy race of wood-peckers) migrates,
while the feeble little golden-crowned wren, that shadow of a bird,
braves our severest frosts without availing himself of houses or
villages, to which most of our winter birds crowd in distressful
seasons, while this keeps aloof in fields and woods; but perhaps this
may be the reason why they may often perish, and why they are almost as
rare as any bird we know.

I have no reason to doubt but that the soft-billed birds, which winter
with us, subsist chiefly on insects in their aurelia state. All the
species of wagtails in severe weather haunt shallow streams near their
spring-heads, where they never freeze; and, by wading, pick out the
aurelias of the genus of Phryganeae,* etc.

* See Derham’s Physico-theology, p. 235.


Hedge-sparrows frequent sinks and gutters in hard weather, where they
pick up crumbs and other sweepings: and in mild weather they procure
worms, which are stirring every month in the year, as any one may see
that will only be at the trouble of taking a candle to a grass-plot on
any mild winter’s night. Red-breasts and wrens in the winter haunt
out-houses, stables, and barns, where they find spiders and flies that
have laid themselves up during the cold season. But the grand support
of the soft-billed birds in winter is that infinite profusion of
aureliae of the lepidoptera ordo, which is fastened to the twigs of
trees and their trunks; to the pales and walls of gardens and
buildings; and is found in every cranny and cleft of rock or rubbish,
and even in the ground itself.

Every species of titmouse winters with us; they have what I call a kind
of intermediate bill between the hard and the soft, between the
Linnaean genera of fringilla and motacilla. One species alone spends
its whole time in the woods and fields, never retreating for succour in
the severest seasons to houses and neighbourhoods; and that is the
delicate long-tailed titmouse, which is almost as minute as the
golden-crowned wren: but the blue titmouse, or nun (parus caeruleus),
the cole-mouse (parus ater), the great black-headed titmouse
(fringillago), and the marsh titmouse (parus palustris), all resort, at
times, to buildings; and in hard weather particularly. The great
titmouse, driven by stress of weather, much frequents houses, and, in
deep snows, I have seen this bird, while it hung with its back
downwards (to my no small delight and admiration), draw straw
lengthwise from out the eaves of thatched houses, in order to pull out
the flies that were concealed between them, and that in such numbers
that they quite defaced the thatch, and gave it a ragged appearance.

The blue titmouse, or nun, is a great frequenter of houses, and a
general devourer. Beside insects, it is very fond of flesh; for it
frequently picks bones on dung-hills: it is a vast admirer of suet, and
haunts butchers’ shops. When a boy, I have known twenty in a morning
caught with snap mousetraps, baited with tallow or suet. It will also
pick holes in apples left on the ground, and be well entertained with
the seeds on the head of a sunflower. The blue, marsh, and great
titmice will, in very severe weather, carry away barley and oat straws
from the sides of ricks.

How the wheat-ear and whin-chat support themselves in winter cannot be
so easily ascertained, since they spend their time on wild heaths and
warrens; the former especially, where there are stone quarries: most
probably it is that their maintenance arises from the aureliae of the
lepidoptera ordo, which furnish them with a plentiful table in the
wilderness.

I am, etc.




Letter XLII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, March 9, 1775.

Dear Sir,

Some future faunist, a man of fortune, will, I hope, extend his visits
to the kingdom of Ireland; a new field, and a country little known to
the naturalist. He will not, it is to be wished, undertake that tour
unaccompanied by a botanist, because the mountains have scarcely been
sufficiently examined; and the southerly counties of so mild an island
may possibly afford some plants little to be expected within the
British dominions. A person of a thinking turn of mind will draw many
just remarks from the modern improvements of that country, both in arts
and agriculture, where premiums obtained long before they were heard of
with us. The manners of the wild natives, their superstitions, their
prejudices, their sordid way of life, will extort from him many useful
reflections. He should also take with him an able draughtsman: for he
must by no means pass over the noble castles and seats, the extensive
and picturesque lakes and water-falls, and the lofty stupendous
mountains, so little known, and so engaging to the imagination when
described and exhibited in a lively manner: such a work would be well
received.

As I have seen no modern map of Scotland, I cannot pretend to say how
accurate or particular any such may be; but this I know, that the best
old maps of that kingdom are very defective.

The great obvious defect that I have remarked in all maps of Scotland
that have fallen in my way is, a want of a coloured line, or stroke,
that shall exactly define the just limits of that district called the
Highlands. Moreover, all the great avenues to that mountainous and
romantic country want to be well distinguished. The military roads
formed by General Wade are so great and Roman-like an undertaking that
they well merit attention. My old map, Moll’s Map, takes notice of Fort
William; but could not mention the other forts that have been erected
long since: therefore a good representation of the chain of forts
should not be omitted.

The celebrated zigzag up the Coryarich must not be passed over. Mall
takes notice of Hamilton and Drumlanrig, and such capital houses; but a
new survey, no doubt, should represent every seat and castle remarkable
for any great event, or celebrated for its paintings, etc. Lord
Breadalbane’s seat and beautiful policy are too curious and
extraordinary to be omitted.

The seat of the Earl of Eglintoun, near Glasgow, is worthy of notice.
The pine plantations of that nobleman are very grand and extensive
indeed.

I am, etc.




Letter XLIII


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Dear Sir,

A pair of honey-buzzards, buteo opivorus, sive vespivorus Raii, built
them a large shallow nest, composed of twigs and lined with dead
beechen leaves, upon a tall slender beech near the middle of
Selborne-hanger, in the summer of 1780. In the middle of the month of
June a bold boy climbed this tree, though standing on so steep and
dizzy a situation, and brought down an egg, the only one in the nest,
which had been sat on for some time, and contained the embrio of a
young bird. The egg was smaller, and not so round as those of the
common buzzard; was dotted at each end with small red spots, and
surrounded in the middle with a broad bloody zone.

The hen-bird was shot, and answered exactly to Mr. Ray’s description of
that species; had a black cere, short thick legs, and a long tail. When
on the wing this species may be easily distinguished from the common
buzzard by its hawk-like appearance, small head, wings not so blunt,
and longer tail. This specimen contained in its craw some limbs of
frogs, and many grey snails without shells. The irides of the eyes of
this bird were of a beautiful bright yellow colour.

About the tenth of July in the same summer a pair of sparrow-hawks bred
in an old crow’s nest on a low beech in the same hanger; and as their
brood, which was numerous, began to grow up, became so daring and
ravenous, that they were a terror to all the dames in the village that
had chickens or ducklings under their care. A boy climbed the tree, and
found the young so fledged that they all escaped from him: but
discovered that a good house had been kept: the larder was well-stored
with provisions; for he brought down a young blackbird, jay, and house
martin, all clean picked, and some half devoured. The old birds had
been observed to make sad havoc for some days among the new-flown
swallows and martins, which, being but lately out of their nests, had
not acquired those powers and command of wing that enable them, when
more mature, to set such enemies at defiance.




Letter XLIV


To Thomas Pennant, Esquire


Selborne, Nov. 30, 1780.

Dear Sir,

Every incident that occasions a renewal of our correspondence will ever
be pleasing and agreeable to me.

As to the wild wood-pigeon, the oenas, or vinago, of Ray, I am much of
your mind; and see no reason for making it the origin of the common
house-dove: but suppose those that have advanced that opinion may have
been misled by another appellation, often given to the oenas, is that
of stock-dove.

Unless the stock-dove in the winter varies greatly in manners from
itself in summer, no species seems more unlikely to be domesticated,
and to make an house-dove. We very rarely see the latter settle on
trees at all, nor does it ever haunt the woods; but the former, as long
as it stays with us, from November perhaps to February, lives the same
wild life with the ring-dove, palumbus torquatus; frequents coppices
and groves, supports itself chiefly by mast, and delights to roost in
the tallest beeches. Could it be known in what manner stock-doves
build, the doubt would be settled with me at once, provided they
construct their nests on trees, like the ring-dove, as I much suspect
they do.

You received, you say, last spring a stock-dove from Sussex; and are
informed that they sometimes breed in that county. But why did not your
correspondent determine the place of its nidification, whether on
rocks, cliffs, or trees ? If he was not an adroit ornithologist I
should doubt the fact, because people with us perpetually confound the
stock-dove with the ring-dove.

For my own part, I readily concur with you in supposing that
house-doves are derived from the small blue rock-pigeon, for many
reasons. In the first place, the wild stock-dove is manifestly larger
than the common house-dove, against the usual rule of domestication,
which generally enlarges the breed. Again, these two remarkable black
spots on the remiges of each wing of the stock-dove, which are so
characteristic of the species, would not, one should think, be totally
lost by its being reclaimed; but would often break out among its
descendants. But what is worth an hundred arguments is, the instance
you give in Sir Roger Mostyn’s house-doves, in Caernarvonshire; which,
though tempted by plenty of food and gentle treatment, can never be
prevailed on to inhabit their cote for any time; but as soon as they
begin to breed, betake themselves to the fastnesses of Ormshead, and
deposit their young in safety amidst the inaccessible caverns and
precipices of that stupendous promontory.

Naturam expellas furcâ, tamen usque recurret.


I have consulted a sportsman, now in his seventy-eighth year, who tells
me that fifty or sixty years back, when the beechen woods were much
more extensive than at present, the number of wood-pigeons was
astonishing; that he has often killed near twenty in a day; and that
with a long wildfowl piece he has shot seven or eight at a time on the
wing as they came wheeling over his head: he moreover adds, which I was
not aware of, that often there were among them little parties of small
blue doves, which he calls rockiers. The food of these numberless
emigrants was beech-mast and some acorns; and particularly barley,
which they collected in the stubbles. But of late years, since the vast
increase of turnips, that vegetable has furnished a great part of their
support in hard weather; and the holes they pick in these roots greatly
damage the crop. From this food their flesh has contracted a rancidness
which occasions them to be rejected by nicer judges of eating, who
thought them before a delicate dish. They were shot not only as they
were feeding in the fields, and especially in snowy weather, but also
at the close of the evening, by men who lay in ambush among the woods
and groves to kill them as they came in to roost.* These are the
principal circumstances relating to this wonderful internal migration,
which with us takes place towards the end of November, and ceases early
in the spring. Last winter we had in Selborne high wood about an
hundred of these doves; but in former times the flocks were so vast not
only with us but all the district round, that on mornings and evenings
they traversed the air, like rooks, in strings, reaching for a mile
together. When they thus rendezvoused here by thousands, if they
happened to be suddenly roused from their roost-trees on an evening,

Their rising all at once was like the sound
Of thunder heard remote….


* Some old sportsmen say that the main part of these flocks used to
withdraw as soon as the heavy Christmas frosts were over.


It will by no means be foreign to the present purpose to add, that I
had a relation in this neighbourhood who made it a practice for a time,
whenever he could procure the eggs of a ring-dove, to place them under
a pair of doves that were sitting in his own pigeon-house; hoping
thereby, if he could bring about a coalition, to enlarge his breed, and
teach his own doves to beat out into the woods and to support
themselves by mast: the plan was plausible, but something always
interrupted the success; for though the birds were usually hatched, and
sometimes grew to half their size, yet none ever arrived at maturity. I
myself have seen these foundlings in their nest displaying a strange
ferocity of nature, so as scarcely to bear to be looked at, and
snapping with their bills by way of menace. In short, they always died,
perhaps for want of proper sustenance: but the owner thought that by
their fierce and wild demeanour they frighted their foster-mothers, and
so were starved.

Virgil, as a familiar occurrence, by way of simile, describes a dove
haunting the cavern of a rock in such engaging numbers, that I cannot
refrain from quoting the passage: and John Dryden has rendered it so
happily in our language, that without farther excuse I shall add his
translation also.

Qualis speluncâ subitò commota Columba,
Cui domus, et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi,
Fertur in arva volans, plausumque exterrita pennis
Dat tecto ingentem—mox aere lapse quieto,
Radit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alas.


As when a dove her rocky hold forsakes,
Rous’d, in her fright her sounding wings she shakes;
The cavern rings with clattering:—out she flies,
And leaves her callow care, and cleaves the skies:
At first she flutters:—but at length she springs
To smoother flight, and shoots upon her wings.


I am, &c.




LETTERS to DAINES BARRINGTON




Letter I


To The Honourable Daines Barrington


Selborne, June 30, 1769.

Dear Sir,

When I was in town last month I partly engaged that I would sometime do
myself the honour to write to you on the subject of natural history:
and I 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 observations from the subject itself, and not from the
writings of others.

The following is a List of the Summer Birds of  Passage which I have
discovered in this neighbourhood, ranged somewhat in the order in which
they appear.

Usually appears about:

1. Wry-neck, Raii nomina: Jynx, sive torquilla: The middle of March:
harsh note.

2. Smallest willow-wren, Regulus non cristatus: March 23: chirps till
September.

3. Swallow, Hirundo domestica: April 13.

4. Martin, Hirundo rustica: Ditto.

5. Sand-martin, Hirundo riparia: Ditto.

6. Black-cap, Atricapilla: Ditto: a sweet wild note.

7. Nightingale, Luscinia: Beginning of April.

8. Cuckoo, Cuculus: Middle of April.

9. Middle willow-wren, Regulus non cristatus: Ditto, a sweet plaintive
note.

10. White-throat, Ficedulae affinis: Middle of April: mean note; sings
on till September.

11. Red-start, Ruticilla: Ditto: more agreeable song.

12. Stone curlew, OEdicnemus: End of March; loud nocturnal whistle.

13. Turtle-dove, Turtur:

14. Grasshopper-lark, Alauda minima locustae voce: Middle of April: a
small sibilous note, till the end of July.

15. Swift, Hirundo apus: About April 27.

16. Less reed-sparrow, Passer arundinaceus minor: A sweet polyglot, but
hurrying: it has the notes of many birds.

17. Land-rail, Ortygometra: A loud harsh note, crex, crex.

18. Largest willow-wren, Regulus non cristatus: Cantat voce stridula
locustae; end of April, on the tops of high beeches.

19. Goat-sucker, or fern-owl, Caprimulgus: Beginning of May; chatters
by night with a singular noise.

20. Fly-catcher, Stoparola: May 12. A very mute bird: this is the
latest summer bird of passage.

This assemblage of curious and amusing birds belongs to ten several
genera of the Linnaean system; and are all of the ordo of passeres,
save the jynx and cuculus, which are picae, and the charadrius
(oedicnemus) and rallus (ortygometra) which are grallae.

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

1. Jynx.

2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 18. Motacilla.

3, 4, 5, 15. Hirundo.

8. Cuculus.

12. Charadrius.

13. Columba.

17. Rallus.

19. Caprimulgus.

14. Alauda.

20. Muscicapa.

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

Red-breast, Raii nomina: Rubecula:

Wren, Passer troglodytes: These frequent houses; and haunt outbuildings
in the winter; eat spiders.

Hedge-sparrow, Curruca: Haunt sinks for crumbs and other sweepings.

White-wagtail, Motacilla alba:

Yellow-wagtail, Motacilla flava:

Grey-wagtail, Motacilla cinerea: These frequent shallow rivulets near
the spring heads, where they never freeze: eat the aureliae of
Phryganea. 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 tertia:

Golden-crowned wren, Regulus cristatus: 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, ranged
somewhat in the order in which they appear:

1.  Ring-ousel, Raii nomina: Merula torquata: This is a new migration
which I have lately discovered about Michaelmas week, and again about
the fourteenth of March.

2.  Redwing, Turdus iliacus: About Michaelmas.

3.  Fieldfare, Turdus pilaris, Though a percher by day, roosts on the
ground.

4. Royston-crew, Cornix cinerea: Most frequent on downs.

5. Wood-cock, Scolopax: Appears about old Michaelmas.

6. Snipe, Gallinago minor: Some snipes constantly breed with us.

7. Jack-snipe, Gallinago minima:

8. Wood-pigeon, OEnas: Seldom appears till late: not in such plenty as
formerly.

9. Wild-swan, Cygnus ferus: On some large waters.

10. Wild-goose, Anser ferus:

11. Wild-duck, Anas torquata minor:

12. Pochard, Anas fera fusca:

13. Widgeon, Penelope:

14. Teal, breeds with us in Wolmer-forest, Querquedula: On our lakes
and streams.

15. Gross-beak, Coccothraustes:

16. Cross-bill, Loxia:

17. Silk-tail, Garrulus bohemicus: These are only wanderers that appear
occasionally, and are not observant of any regular migration.

These birds, as they stand numerically, belong to the f

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