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 following

Linnaean genera:

1, 2, 3. Turdus.

4. Corvus.

5, 6, 7. Scolopax.

8. Columba.

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

15, 16. Loxia.

17. Ampelis.

Birds that sing in the night are but few:

Nightingale, Luscinia: ‘In shadiest covert hid.’—MILTON.

Woodlark, Alauda arborea: Suspended in mid air.

Less reed-sparrow, Passer arundinaceus minor: Among reeds and willows.

I should now proceed to such birds as continue to sing after Midsummer,

but, as they are rather numerous, they would exceed the bounds of this

paper: besides, as this is now the season for remarking on that

subject, I am willing to repeat my observations on some birds

concerning the continuation of whose song I seem at present to have

some doubt.

I am, etc.

Letter II

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Nov. 2, 1769.

Dear Sir,

When I did myself the honour to write to you about the end of last June

on the subject of natural history, I sent you a list of the summer

birds of passage which I have observed in this neighbourhood; and also

a list of the winter birds of passage; I mentioned besides those

soft-billed birds that stay with us the winter through in the south of

England, and those that are remarkable for singing in the night.

According to my proposal, I shall now proceed to such birds (singing

birds strictly so called) as continue in full song till after

Midsummer; and shall range them somewhat in the order in which they

first begin to open as the spring advances.

1. Woodlark, Raii nomina: Alauda arborea: In January, and continues to

sing through all the summer and autumn.

2. Song-thrush, Turdus simpliciter dictus: In February and on to

August, reassume their song in autumn.

3. Wren, Passer troglodytes: All the year, hard frost excepted.

4. Red-breast, Rubecula: Ditto.

5. Hedge-sparrow, Curruca: Early in February to July the 10th.

6. Yellow-hammer, Emberiza flava: Early in February, and on through

July to August the 21st.

7. Skylark, Alauda vulgaris: In February, and on to October.

8. Swallow, Hirundo domestica: From April to September.

9. Black-cap, Atricapilla: Beginning of April to July 13.

10. Titlark, Alauda pratorum: From middle of April to July the 16th.

11. Blackbird, Merula vulgaris: Sometimes in February and March, and so

on to July the twenty third; reassumes in autumn.

12. White-throat, Ficedulcae affinis: In April and on to July 23.

13. Goldfinch, Carduelis: April and through to September 16.

14. Greenfinch, Chloris: On to July and August 2.

15. Less reed-sparrow, Passer arundinaceus minor: May, on to beginning

of July.

16. Common linnet, Linaria vulgaris: Breeds and whistles on till

August; reassumes its note when they begin to congregate in October,

and again early before the flock separate.

Birds that cease to be in full song, and are usually silent at or

before Midsurnmer:

17. Middle willow-wren, Regulus non cristatus: Middle of June: begins

in April.

18. Red-start, Ruticilla: Middle of June: begins in May.

19. Chaffinch, Fringilla: Beginning of June: sings first in February.

20. Nightingale, Luscinia: Middle of June: sings first in April.

Birds that sing for a short tune, and very early in the spring:

21. Missel-bird, Turdus viscivorus: January the 2nd, 1770, in February.

Is called in Hampshire and Sussex the storm-cock, because its song is

supposed to forebode windy wet weather: is the largest singing bird we

have.

22. Great tit-mouse, or ox-eye, Fringillago: In February, March, April:

reassumes for a short time in September.

Birds that have somewhat of a note or song, and yet are hardly to be

called singing birds:

23. Golden-crowned wren, Regulus cristatus: Its note as minute as its

person; frequents the tops of high oaks and firs; the smallest British

bird.

24. Marsh titmouse, Parus palustris: Haunts great woods; two harsh

sharp notes.

25. Small willow-wren, Regulus non cristatus: Sings in March and on to

September.

26. Largest ditto, Ditto: Cantat voce stridula locustae: from end of

April to August.

27. Grasshopper-lark, Alauda minima voce locustae: Chirps all night,

from the middle of April to the end of July

28. Martin, Hirundo agrestis: All the breeding time; from May to

September.

29. Bullfinch, Pyrrhula:

30. Bunting, Emberiza alba: From the end of January to July.

All singing birds, and those that have any pretensions to song, not

only in Britain, but perhaps the world through, come under the Linnaean

ordo of passeres.

The above-mentioned birds, as they stand numerically, belong to the

following Linnaean genera.

1, 7, 10, 27. Alauda.

2, 11, 21. Turdus.

3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 23, 25, 26. Motacilla.

6, 30. Emberiza.

8, 28. Hirundo.

13, 16, 19. Pringilla.

22, 24. Parus.

14, 29. Loxia.

Birds that sing as they fly are but few:

Skylark, Raii nomina. Alauda vulgaris: Rising, suspended, and falling.

Titlark, Alauda pratorum: In its descent; also sitting on trees, and

walking on the ground.

Woodlark, Alauda arborea: Suspended; in hot summer nights all night

long.

Blackbird, Merula: Sometimes from bush to bush.

White-throat, Ficedulae affinis: Uses when singing on the wing odd

jerks and gesticulations.

Swallow, Hirundo domestica: In soft sunny weather.

Wren, Passer troglodytes: Sometimes from bush to bush.

Birds that breed most early in these parts:

Raven, Corvus: Hatches in February and March.

Song-thrush, Turdus: In March.

Blackbird, Merula: In March.

Rook, Cornix frugilega: Builds the beginning of March.

Woodlark, Alauda arborea: Hatches in April.

Ring-dove, Palurnbus torquatus: Lays the beginning of April.

All birds that continue in full song till after Midsummer appear to me

to breed more than once.

Most kinds of birds seem to me to be wild and shy somewhat in

proportion to their bulk; I mean in this island, where they are much

pursued and annoyed: but in Ascension-island, and many other desolate

places, mariners have found fowls so unacquainted with an human figure,

that they would stand still to be taken; as is the case with boobies,

etc. As an example of what is advanced, I remark that the

golden-crested wren (the smallest British bird) will stand unconcerned

till you come within three or four yards of it, while the bustard

(otis), the largest British land fowl, does not care to admit a person

within so many furlongs.

I am, etc.

Letter III

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Jan. 15, 1770.

Dear Sir,

It was no small matter of satisfaction to me to find that you were not

displeased with my little methodus of birds. If there was any merit in

the sketch, it must be owing to its punctually. For many months I

carried a list in my pocket of the birds that were to be remarked, and,

as I rode or walked about my business, I noted each day the continuance

or omission of each bird’s song; so that I am as sure of the certainty

of my facts as a man can be of any transaction whatsoever.

I shall now proceed to answer the several queries which you put in your

two obliging letters, in the best manner that I am able. Perhaps

Eastwick, and its environs, where you heard so very few birds, is not a

woodland country, and therefore not stocked with such songsters. If you

will cast your eye on my last letter, you will find that many species

continued to warble after the beginning of July.

The titlark and yellowhammer breed late, the latter very late; and

therefore it is no wonder that they protract their song; for I lay it

down as a maxim in ornithology, that as long as there is any incubation

going on there is music. As to the red-breast and wren, it is well

known to the most incurious observer that they whistle the year round,

hard frost excepted; especially the latter.

It was not in my power to procure you a black-cap, or a less

reed-sparrow, or sedge-bird, alive. As the first is undoubtedly, and

the last, as far as I can yet see, a summer bird of passage, they would

require more nice and curious management in a cage than I should be

able to give them; they are both distinguished songsters. The note of

the former has such a wild sweetness that it always brings to my mind

those lines in a song in As You Like It,

And tune his merry note

Unto the wild bird’s throat.—Shakespeare.

The latter has a surprising variety of notes resembling the song of

several other birds; but then it also has an hurrying manner, not at

all to its advantage; it is notwithstanding a delicate polyglot.

It is new to me that titlarks in cages sing in the night; perhaps only

caged birds do so. I once knew a tame red-breast in a cage that always

sang as long as candles were in the room; but in their wild state no

one supposes they sing in the night.

I should be almost ready to doubt the fact, that there are to be seen

much fewer birds in July than in any former month, notwithstanding so

many young are hatched daily. Sure I am that it is far otherwise with

respect to the swallow tribe, which increases prodigiously as the

summer advances: and I saw, at the time mentioned, many hundreds of

young wagtails on the banks of the Cherwell, which almost covered the

meadows. If the matter appears as you say in the other species, may it

not be owing to the dams being engaged in incubation, while the young

are concealed by the leaves ?

Many times have I had the curiosity to open the stomachs of woodcocks

and snipes; but nothing ever occurred that helped to explain to me what

their subsistence might be: all that I could ever find was a soft

mucus, among which lay many pellucid small gravels.

I am, etc.

Letter IV

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Feb. 19, 1770.

Dear Sir,

Your observation that ‘the cuckoo does not deposit its egg

indiscriminately in the nest of the first bird that comes in its way,

but probably looks out a nurse in some degree congenerous, with whom to

intrust its young,’ is perfectly new to me; and struck me so forcibly,

that I naturally fell into a train of thought that led me to consider

whether the fact was so, and what reason there was for it. When I came

to recollect and inquire, I could not find that any cuckoo had ever

been seen in these parts, except in the nest of the wagtail, the

hedge-sparrow, the titlark, the white-throat, and the red-breast, all

soft-billed insectivorous birds. The excellent Mr. Willughby mentions

the nest of the palumbus (ring-dove), and of the fringilla (chaffinch),

birds that subsist on acorns and grains, and such hard food: but then

he does not mention them as of his own knowledge; but says afterwards

that he saw himself a wagtail feeding a cuckoo. It appears hardly

possible that a soft-billed bird should subsist on the same food with

the hard-billed: for the former have thin membranaceous stomachs suited

to their soft food; while the latter, the granivorous tribe, have

strong muscular gizzards, which, like mills, grind, by the help of

small gravels and pebbles, what is swallowed. This proceeding of the

cuckoo, of dropping its eggs as it were by chance, is such a monstrous

outrage on maternal affection, one of the first great dictates of

nature, and such a violence on instinct, that, had it only been related

of a bird in the Brazils, or Peru, it would never have merited our

belief. But yet, should it farther appear that this simple bird, when

divested of the natural στοργὴ that seems to raise the kind in general

above themselves, and inspire them with extraordinary degrees of

cunning and address, may be still endued with a more enlarged faculty

of discerning what species are suitable and congenerous nursing-mothers

for its disregarded eggs and young, and may deposit them only under

their care, this would be adding wonder to wonder, and instancing in a

fresh manner that the methods of Providence are not subjected to any

mode or rule, but astonish us in new lights, and in various and

changeable appearances.

What was said by a very ancient and sublime writer concerning the

defect of natural affection in the ostrich, may be well applied to the

bird we are talking of:

‘She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers:

Because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to

her understanding.’*

* Job xxxix. 16, 17.

Query.—Does each female cuckoo lay but one egg in a season, or does she

drop several in different nests according as opportunity offers?

I am, etc.

Letter V

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, April 12, 1770.

Dear Sir,

I heard many birds of several species sing last year after Midsummer;

enough to prove that the summer solstice is not the period that puts a

stop to the music of the woods. The yellowhammer no doubt persists with

more steadiness than any other; but the woodlark, the wren, the

red-breast, the swallow, the white-throat, the goldfinch, the common

linnet, are all undoubted instances of the truth of what I advance.

If this severe season does not interrupt the regularity of the summer

migrations, the black-cap will be here in two or three days. I wish it

was in my power to procure you one of those songsters; but I am no

birdcatcher; and so little used to birds in a cage, that I fear if I

had one it would soon die for want of skill in feeding.

Was your reed-sparrow, which you kept in a cage, the thick-billed

reed-sparrow of the Zoology, p. 320; or was it the less reed-sparrow of

Ray, the sedge-bird of Mr. Pennant’s last publication, p. 16?

As to the matter of long-billed birds growing fatter in moderate

frosts, I have no doubt within myself what should be the reason. The

thriving at those times appears to me to arise altogether from the

gentle check which the cold throws upon insensible perspiration. The

case is just the same with blackbirds, etc.; and farmers and warreners

observe, the first, that their hogs fat more kindly at such times, and

the latter that the rabbits are never in such good case as in a gentle

frost. But when frosts are severe, and of long continuance, the case is

soon altered; for then a want of food soon overbalances the repletion

occasioned by a checked perspiration. I have observed, moreover, that

some human constitutions are more inclined to plumpness in winter than

in summer.

When birds come to suffer by severe frost, I find that the first that

fail and die are the redwing-fieldfares, and then the song-thrushes.

You wonder, with good reason, that the hedge-sparrows, etc., can be

induced to sit at all on the egg of the cuckoo without being

scandalized at the vast disproportioned size of the supposititious egg;

but the brute creation, I suppose, have very little idea of size,

colour, or number. For the common hen, I know, when the fury of

incubation is on her, will sit on a single shapeless stone instead of a

nest full of eggs that have been withdrawn: and, moreover, a

hen-turkey, in the same circumstances, would sit on in the empty nest

till she perished with hunger.

I think the matter might easily be determined whether a cuckoo lays one

or two eggs, or more, in a season, by opening a female during the

laying-time. If more than one was come down out of the ovary, and

advanced to a good size, doubtless then she would that spring lay more

than one.

I will endeavour to get a hen, and to examine.

Your supposition that there may be some natural obstruction in singing

birds while they are mute, and that when this is removed the song

recommences is new and bold; I wish you could discover some good

grounds for this suspicion.

I was glad you were pleased with my specimen of the caprimulgus, or

fern-owl; you were, I find, acquainted with the bird before.

When we meet, I shall be glad to have some conversation with you

concerning the proposal you make of my drawing up an account of the

animals in this neighbourhood. Your partiality towards my small

abilities persuades you, I fear, that I am able to do more than is in

my power: for it is no small undertaking for a man unsupported and

alone to begin a natural history from his own autopsia! Though there is

endless room for observation in the field of nature, which is

boundless, yet investigation (where a man endeavours to be sure of his

facts) can make but slow progress; and all that one could collect in

many years would go into a very narrow compass.

Some extracts from your ingenious ‘Investigations of the difference

between the present temperature of the air in Italy,’ etc., have fallen

in my way, and gave me great satisfaction: they have removed the

objections that always rose in my mind whenever I came to the passages

which you quote. Surely the judicious Virgil, when writing a didactic

poem for the region of Italy, could never think of describing freezing

rivers, unless such severity of weather pretty frequently occurred!

P.S. Swallows appear amidst snows and frost.

Letter VI

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, May 21, 1770.

Dear Sir,

The severity and turbulence of last month so interrupted the regular

progress of summer migration, that some of the birds do but just begin

to show themselves, and others are apparently thinner than usual; as

the white-throat, the black-cap, the red-start, the fly-catcher. I well

remember that after the very severe spring in the year 1739-40 summer

birds of passage were very scarce. They come probably hither with a

south-east wind, or when it blows between those points; but in that

unfavourable year the winds blowed the whole spring and summer through

from the opposite quarters. And yet amidst all these disadvantages two

swallows, as I mentioned in my last, appeared this year as early as the

eleventh of April amidst frost and snow; but they withdrew again for a

time.

I am not pleased to find that some people seem so little satisfied with

Scopoli’s new publication;* there is room to expect great things from

the hands of that man, who is a good naturalist: and one would think

that an history of the birds of so distant and southern a region as

Carniola would be new and interesting. I could wish to see that work,

and hope to get it sent down. Dr. Scopoli is physician to the wretches

that work in the quicksilver mines of that district.

* This work he calls his Annus Primus Historico-Naturalis.

When you talked of keeping a reed-sparrow, and giving it seeds, I could

not help wondering; because the reed-sparrow which I mentioned to you

(passer arundinaceus minor Raii) is a soft-billed bird; and most

probably migrates hence before winter; whereas the bird you kept

(passer torquatus Raii) abides all the year, and is a thick-billed

bird. I question whether the latter be much of a songster; but in this

matter I want to be better informed. The former has a variety of

hurrying notes, and sings all night. Some part of the song of the

former, I suspect, is attributed to the latter. We have plenty of the

soft-billed sort; which Mr. Pennant had entirely left out of his

British Zoology, till I reminded him of his omission. See British

Zoology last published, p. 16.**

** See Letter XXV to Mr. Pennant.

I have somewhat to advance on the different manners in which different

birds fly and walk; but as this is a subject that I have not enough

considered, and is of such a nature as not to be contained in a small

space, I shall say nothing farther about it at present.*

* See Letter XLIII to Mr. Barrington.

No doubt the reason why the sex of birds in their first plumage is so

difficult to be distinguished is, as you say, ‘because they are not to

pair and discharge their parental functions till the ensuing spring.’

As colours seem to be the chief external sexual distinction in many

birds, these colours do not take place till sexual attachments begin to

obtain. And the case is the same in quadrupeds; among whom, in their

younger days, the sexes differ but little: but, as they advance to

maturity, horns and shaggy manes, beards and brawny necks, etc., etc.,

strongly discriminate the male from the female. We may instance still

farther in our own species, where a beard and stronger features are

usually characteristic of the male sex: but this sexual diversity does

not take place in earlier life; for a beautiful youth shall be so like

a beautiful girl that the difference shall not be discernible:

Quem si puellarum insereres choro,

Mire sagaces falleret hospites

Discrimen obscurum, solutis

Crinibus, ambiguoque vultu.—HOR.

Letter VII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Ringmer, near Lewes, Oct. 8, 1770.

Dear Sir,

I am glad to hear that Kuckalm is to furnish you with the birds of

Jamaica; a sight of the hirundines of that hot and distant island would

be great entertainment to me.

The Anni of Scopoli are now in my possession; and I have read the Annus

Primus with satisfaction: for though some parts of this work are

exceptionable, and he may advance some mistaken observations; yet the

ornithology of so distant a country as Carniola is very curious. Men

that undertake only one district are much more likely to advance

natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly

be acquainted with: every kingdom, every province, should have its own

monographer.

The reason perhaps why he mentions nothing of Ray’s Ornithology may be

the extreme poverty and distance of his country, into which the works

of our great naturalist may have never yet found their way. You have

doubts, I know, whether this Ornithology is genuine, and really the

work of Scopoli: as to myself, I think I discover strong tokens of

authenticity; the style corresponds with that of his Entomology: and

his characters of his Ordines and Genera are many of them new,

expressive, and masterly. He has ventured to alter some of the Linnaean

genera with sufficient show of reason.

It might perhaps be mere accident that you saw so many swifts and no

swallows at Staines; because, in my long observations of those birds, I

never could discover the least degree of rivalry or hostility between

the species.

Ray remarks that birds of the gallinae order, as cocks and hens,

partridges, and pheasants, etc., are pulveratrices, such as dust

themselves, using that method of cleansing their feathers, and ridding

themselves of their vermin. As far as I can observe, many birds that

dust themselves never wash: and I once thought that those birds that

wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken; for

common house-sparrows are great pulveratrices, being frequency seen

grovelling and wallowing in dusty roads; and yet they are great

washers. Does not the skylark dust?

Query.—Might not Mahomet and his followers take one method of

purification from these pulveratrices? because I find from travellers

of credit, that if a strict Mussulman is journeying in a sandy desert

where no water is to be found, at stated hours he strips off his

clothes, and most scrupulously rubs his body over with sand or dust.

A countryman told me he had found a young fern-owl in the nest of a

small bird on the ground; and that it was fed by the little bird. I

went to see this extraordinary phenomenon, and found that it was a

young cuckoo hatched in the nest of a titlark; it was become vastly too

big for its nest, appearing

… in tenui re

Majores pennas nido extendisse …

and was very fierce and pugnacious, pursuing my finger, as I teased it,

for many feet from the nest, and sparring and buffeting with its wings

like a game-cock. The dupe of a dam appeared at a distance, hovering

about with meat in its mouth, and expressing the greatest solicitude.

In July I saw several cuckoos skimming over a large pond; and found,

after some observation, that they were feeding on the libellulae, or

dragon-flies; some of which they caught as they settled on the weeds,

and some as they were on the wing. Notwithstanding what Linnaeus says,

I cannot be induced to believe that they are birds of prey.

This district affords some birds that are hardly ever heard of at

Selborne. In the first place considerable flocks of cross-beaks (loxiae

curvirostrae) have appeared this summer in the pine-groves belonging to

this house; the water-ousel is said to haunt the mouth of the Lewes

river, near Newhaven; and the Cornish chough builds, I know, all along

the chalky cliffs of the Sussex shore.

I was greatly pleased to see little parties of ring-ousels (my

newly-discovered migrators) scattered, at intervals, all along the

Sussex-downs from Chichester to Lewes. Let them come from whence they

will, it looks very auspicious that they are cantoned along the coast

in order to pass the channel when severe weather advances. They visit

us again in April, as it should seem, in their return; and are not to

be found in the dead of winter. It is remarkable that they are very

tame, and seem to have no manner of apprehensions of danger from a

person with a gun. There are bustards on the wide downs near

Brighthelmstone. No doubt you are acquainted with the Sussex-downs: the

prospects and rides round Lewes are most lovely!

As I rode along near the coast I kept a very sharp lookout in the lanes

and woods, hoping I might, at this time of the year, have discovered

some of the summer short-winged birds of passage crowding towards the

coast in order for their departure: but it was very extraordinary that

I never saw a red-start, white-throat, black-cap, uncrested wren,

fly-catcher, etc. And I remember to have made the same remark in former

years, as I usually come to this place annually about this time. The

birds most common along the coast at present are the stone-chatters,

whin-chats, buntings, linnets, some few wheatears, titlarks, etc.

Swallows and house-martins abound yet, induced to prolong their stay by

this soft, still, dry season.

A land-tortoise, which has been kept for thirty years in a little

walled court belonging to the house where I now am visiting, retires

under ground about the middle of November, and comes forth again about

the middle of April. When it first appears in the spring it discovers

very little inclination towards food; but in the height of summer grows

voracious: and then as the summer declines its appetite declines; so

that for the last six weeks in autumn it hardly eats at all. Milky

plants, such as lettuces, dandelions, sow-thistles, are its favourite

dish. In a neighbouring village one was kept till by tradition it was

supposed to be an hundred years old. An instance of vast longevity in

such a poor reptile!

Letter VIII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Dec. 20, 1770.

Dear Sir,

The birds that I took for aberdavines were reed-sparrows (passeres

torquati).

There are doubtless many home internal migrations within this kingdom

that want to be better understood: witness those vast flocks of hen

chaffinches that appear with us in the winter without hardly any cocks

among them. Now was there a due proportion of each sex, it should seem

very improbable that any one district should produce such numbers of

these little birds; and much more when only half of the species

appears: therefore we may conclude that the fringillae caelebes, for

some good purposes, have a peculiar migration of their own in which the

sexes part. Nor should it seem so wonderful that the intercourse of

sexes in this species of birds should be interrupted in winter; since

in many animals, and particularly in bucks and does, the sexes herd

separately, except at the season when commerce is necessary for the

continuance of the breed. For this matter of the chaffinches see Fauna

Suecica, p. 85, and Systema Naturae, p. 318. I see every winter vast

flights of hen chaffinches, but none of cocks.

Your method of accounting for the periodical motions of the British

singing birds, or birds of flight, is a very probable one; since the

matter of food is a great regulator of the actions and proceedings of

the brute creation: there is but one that can be set in competition

with it, and that is love. But I cannot quite acquiesce with you in one

circumstance when you advance that, ‘when they have thus feasted, they

again separate into small parties of five or six, and get the best fare

they can within a certain district, having no inducement to go in quest

of fresh-turned earth.’ Now if you mean that the business of

congregating is quite at an end from the conclusion of wheat-sowing to

the season of barley and oats, it is not the case with us; for larks

and chaffinches, and particularly linnets, flock and congregate as much

in the very dead of winter as when the husbandman is busy with his

ploughs and harrows.

Sure there can be no doubt but that woodcocks and fieldfares leave us

in the spring, in order to cross the seas, and to retire to some

districts more suitable to the purpose of breeding. That the former

pair before they retire, and that the hens are forward with egg, I

myself, when I was a sportsman, have often experienced. It cannot

indeed be denied but that now and then we hear of a woodcock’s nest, or

young birds, discovered in some part or other of this island: but then

they are always mentioned as rarities, and somewhat out of the common

course of things: but as to redwings and fieldfares, no sportsman or

naturalist has ever yet, that I could hear, pretended to have found the

nest or young of those species in any part of these kingdoms. And I the

more admire at this instance as extraordinary, since, to all

appearance, the same food in summer as well as in winter might support

them here which maintains their congeners, the blackbirds and thrushes,

did they choose to stay the summer through. From hence it appears that

it is not food alone which determines some species of birds with regard

to their stay or departure. Fieldfares and redwings disappear sooner or

later according as the warm weather comes on earlier or later. For I

well remember, after that dreadful winter of 1739-40, that cold

north-east winds continued to blow on through April and May, and that

these kinds of birds (what few remained of them) did not depart as

usual, but were seen lingering about till the beginning of June.

The best authority that we can have for the nidification of the birds

above-mentioned in any district, is the testimony of faunists that have

written professedly the natural history of particular countries. Now,

as to the fieldfare, Linnaeus, in his Fauna Suecica, says of it that

‘maximis in arboribus nidificat’; and of the redwing he says, in the

same place, that ‘nidificat in mediis arbusculis, sive sepibus: ova sex

caeruleo-viridia maculis nigris variis.’ Hence we may be assured that

fieldfares and redwings breed in Sweden. Scopoli says, in his Annus

Primus, of the woodcock, that ‘nupta ad nos venit circa aequinoctium

vernale’; meaning in Tirol, of which he is a native. And afterwards he

adds ‘nidificat in paludibus alpinis: ova ponit, 3-5.’ It does not

appear from Kramer that woodcocks breed at all in Austria: but he says

‘Avis haec septentrionalium provinciarum aestivo tempore incola est;

ubi plerumque nidificat. Appropinquante hyeme australiores provincias

petit: hinc circa plenilunium mensis Octobris plerumque Austriam

transmigrat. Tunc rursus circa plenilunium potissimum mensis Martii per

Austriam matrimonio juncta ad septentrionales provincias redit.’ For

the whole passage (which I have abridged) see Elenchus, etc., p. 351.

This seems to be a full proof of the migration of woodcocks; though

little is proved concerning the place of breeding.

P.S. There fell in the county of Rutland, in three weeks of this

present very wet weather, seven inches and an half of rain, which is

more than has fallen in any three weeks for these thirty years past in

that part of the world. A mean quantity in that county one year is

twenty inches and an half.

Letter IX

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Fyfield, near Andover, Feb. 12, 1771.

Dear Sir,

You are, I know, no great friend to migration; and the well attested

accounts from various parts of the kingdom seem to justify you in your

suspicions, that at least many of the swallow kind do not leave us in

the winter, but lay themselves up like insects and bats, in a torpid

state, to slumber away the more uncomfortable months till the return of

the sun and fine weather awakens them.

But then we must not, I think, deny migration in general; because

migration certainly does subsist in some places, as my brother in

Andalusia has fully informed me. Of the motions of these birds he has

ocular demonstration for many weeks together, both spring and fall:

during which periods myriads of the swallow kind traverse the Straits

from north to south, and from south to north, according to the season.

And these vast migrations consist not only of hirundines but of

bee-birds, hoopoes, oro pendolos or golden thrushes, etc., etc., and

also many of our soft-billed summer-birds of passage; and moreover of

birds which never leave us, such as all the various sorts of hawks and

kites. Old Belon, two hundred years ago, gives a curious account of the

incredible armies of hawks and kites which he saw in the spring-time

traversing the Thracian Bosphorus from Asia to Europe. Besides the

above-mentioned, he remarks that the procession is swelled by whole

troops of eagles and vultures.

Now it is no wonder that birds residing in Africa should retreat before

the sun as it advances, and retire to milder regions, and especially

birds of prey, whose blood being heated with hot animal food, are more

impatient of a sultry climate: but then I cannot help wondering why

kites and hawks, and such hardy birds as are known to defy all the

severity of England, and even of Sweden and all north Europe, should

want to migrate from the south of Europe, and be dissatisfied with the

winters of Andalusia.

It does not appear to me that much stress may be laid on the difficulty

and hazard that birds must run in their migrations, by reason of vast

oceans, cross winds, etc.; because, if we reflect, a bird may travel

from England to the equator without launching out and exposing itself

to boundless seas, and that by crossing the water at Dover, and again

at Gibraltar. And I with the more confidence advance this obvious

remark, because my brother has always found that some of his birds, and

particularly the swallow kind, are very sparing of their pains in

crossing the Mediterranean: for when arrived at Gibraltar, they do not

… rang’d in figure wedge their way,

… and set forth

Their airy caravan high over seas

Flying, and over lands with mutual wing

Easing their flight …

MILTON.

but scout and hurry along in little detached parties of six or seven in

a company; and sweeping low, just over the surface of the land and

water, direct their course to the opposite continent at the narrowest

passage they can find. They usually slope across the bay to the

south-west, and so pass over opposite to Tangier, which, it seems, is

the narrowest space.

In former letters we have considered whether it was probable that

woodcocks in moon-shiny nights cross the German ocean from Scandinavia.

As a proof that birds of less speed may pass that sea, considerable as

it is, I shall relate the following incident, which, though mentioned

to have happened so many years ago, was strictly matter of fact: — As

some people were shooting in the parish of Trotton, in the county of

Sussex, they killed a duck in that dreadful winter 1708-9, with a

silver collar about its neck,* on which were engraven the arms of the

king of Denmark. This anecdote the rector of Trotton at that time has

often told to a near relation of mine; and, to the best of my

remembrance, the collar was in the possession of the rector.

* I have read a like anecdote of a swan.

At present I do not know anybody near the sea-side that will take the

trouble to remark at what time of the moon woodcocks first come: if I

lived near the sea myself I would soon tell you more of the matter. One

thing I used to observe when I was a sportsman, that there were times

in which woodcocks were so sluggish and sleepy that they would drop

again when flushed just before the spaniels, nay, just at the muzzle of

a gun that had been fired at them: whether this strange laziness was

the effect of a recent fatiguing journey I shall not presume to say.

Nightingales not only never reach Northumberland and Scotland, but

also, as I have been always told, Devonshire and Cornwall. In those two

last counties we cannot attribute the failure of them to the want of

warmth: the defect in the west is rather a presumptive argument that

these birds come over to us from the continent at the narrowest

passage, and do not stroll so far westward.

Let me hear from your own observation whether skylarks do not dust. I

think they do: and if they do, whether they wash also.

The alauda pratensis of Ray was the poor dupe that was educating the

booby of a cuckoo mentioned in my letter of October last.

Your letter came too late for me to procure a ring-ousel for Mr.

Tunstal during their autumnal visit; but I will endeavour to get him

one when they call on us again in April. I am glad that you and that

gentleman saw my Andalusian birds; I hope they answered your

expectation. Royston, or grey crows, are winter birds that come much

about the same time with the woodcock: they, like the fieldfare and

redwing, have no apparent reason for migration; for as they fare in the

winter like their congeners, so might they in all appearance in the

summer. Was not Tenant, when a boy, mistaken? did he not find a

missel-thrush’s nest, and take it for the nest of a fieldfare?

The stock-dove, or wood-pigeon, oenas Raii, is the last winter bird of

passage which appears with us; and is not seen till towards the end of

November: about twenty years ago they abounded in the district of

Selborne; and strings of them were seen morning and evening that

reached a mile or more: but since the beechen woods have been greatly

thinned they are much decreased in number. The ring-dove, palumbus

Raii, stays with us the whole year, and breeds several times through

the summer.

Before I received your letter of October last I had just remarked in my

journal that the trees were unusually green. This uncommon verdure

lasted on late into November; and may be accounted for from a late

spring, a cool and moist summer; but more particularly from vast armies

of chafers, or tree beetles, which, in many places, reduced whole woods

to a leafless naked state. These trees shot again at Midsummer, and

then retained their foliage till very late in the year.

My musical friend, at whose house I am now visiting, has tried all the

owls that are his near neighbours with a pitch-pipe, set at

concert-pitch, and finds they all hoot in B flat. He will examine the

nightingales next spring.

I am, etc., etc.

Letter X

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Aug. 1, 1771.

Dear Sir,

From what follows, it will appear that neither owls nor cuckoos keep to

one note. A friend remarks that many (most) of his owls hoot in B flat:

but that one went almost half a note below A. The pipe he tried their

notes by was a common half-crown pitch-pipe, such as masters use for

tuning of harpsichords; it was the common London pitch.

A neighbour of mine, who is said to have a nice ear, remarks that the

owls about this village hoot in three different keys, in G flat, or F

sharp, in B flat and A flat. He heard two hooting to each other, the

one in A flat, and the other in B flat. Query: Do these different notes

proceed from different species, or only from various individuals? The

same person finds upon trial that the note of the cuckoo (of which we

have but one species) varies in different individuals; for, about

Selborne wood, he found they were mostly in D: he heard two sing

together, the one in D, the other in D sharp, who made a disagreeable

concert: he afterwards heard one in D sharp, and about Wolmer-forest

some in C. As to nightingales, he says that their notes are so short,

and their transitions so rapid, that he cannot well ascertain their

key. Perhaps in a cage, and in a room, their notes may be more

distinguishable. This person has tried to settle the notes of a swift,

and of several other small birds, but cannot bring them to any

criterion.

As I have often remarked that redwings are some of the first birds that

suffer with us in severe weather, it is no wonder at all they retreat

from Scandinavian winters: and much more the ordo of grallae, who, all

to a bird, forsake the northern parts of Europe at the approach of

winter. ‘Grallae tanquam conjugatae unanimiter in fugam se conjiciunt;

ne earum unicam quidem inter nos habitantem invenire possimus; ut enim

aestate in australibus degere nequeunt ob defectum lumbricorum,

terramque siccam; ita nec in frigidis ob eandem causam,’ says Eckmarck

the Swede, in his ingenious little treatise called Migrationes Avium,

which by all means you ought to read while your thoughts run on the

subject of migration. See Amoenitates Academicae, vol. iv, p. 565.

Birds may be so circumstanced as to be obliged to migrate in one

country and not in another: but the grallae (which procure their food

from marshes and boggy grounds) must in winter forsake the more

northerly parts of Europe, or perish for want of food.

I am glad you are making inquiries from Linnaeus concerning the

woodcock: it is expected of him that he should be able to account for

the motions and manner of life of the animals of his own Fauna.

Faunists, as you observe, are too apt to acquiesce in bare

descriptions, and a few synonyms: the reason is plain; because all that

may be done at home in a man’s study, but the investigation of the life

and conversation of animals, is a concern of much more trouble and

difficulty, and is not to be attained but by the active and

inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the country.

Foreign systematics are, I observe, much too vague in their specific

differences; which are almost universally constituted by one or two

particular marks, the rest of the description running in general terms.

But our countryman, the excellent Mr. Ray, is the only describer that

conveys some precise idea in every term or word, maintaining his

superiority over his followers and imitators in spite of the advantage

of fresh discoveries and modern information.

At this distance of years it is not in my power to recollect at what

periods woodcocks used to be sluggish or alert when I was a sportsman;

but, upon my mentioning this circumstance to a friend, he thinks he has

observed them to be remarkably listless against snowy foul weather: if

this should be the case, then the inaptitude for flying arises only

from an eagerness for food; as sheep are observed to be very intent on

grazing against stormy wet evenings.

I am, etc., etc.

Letter XI

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Feb. 8, 1772.

Dear Sir,

When I ride about in the winter, and see such prodigious flocks of

various kinds of birds, I cannot help admiring at these congregations,

and wishing that it was in my power to account for those appearances

almost peculiar to the season. The two great motives which regulate the

proceedings of the brute creation are love and hunger; the former

incites animals to perpetuate their kind, the latter induces them to

preserve individuals; whether either of these should seem to be the

ruling passion in the matter of congregating is to be considered. As to

love, that is out of the question at a time of the year when that soft

passion is not indulged; besides, during the amorous season, such a

jealousy prevails between the male birds that they can hardly bear to

be together in the same hedge or field. Most of the singing and elation

of spirits of that time seem to me to be the effect of rivalry and

emulation: and it is to this spirit of jealousy that I chiefly

attribute the equal dispersion of birds in the spring over the face of

the country.

Now as to the business of food: as these animals are actuated by

instinct to hunt for necessary food, they should not, one would

suppose, crowd together in pursuit of sustenance at a time when it is

most likely to fail: yet such associations do take place in hard

weather chiefly, and thicken as the severity increases. As some kind of

self-interest and self-defence is no doubt the motive for the

proceeding, may it not arise from the helplessness of their state in

such rigorous seasons; as men crowd together, when under great

calamities, though they know not why? Perhaps approximation may dispel

some degree of cold; and a crowd may make each individual appear safer

from the ravages of birds of prey and other dangers.

If I admire when I see how much congenerous birds love to congregate, I

am the more struck when I see incongruous ones in such strict amity. If

we do not much wonder to see a flock of rooks usually attended by a

train of dews, yet it is strange that the former should so frequently

have a flight of starlings for their satellites. Is it because rooks

have a more discerning scent than their attendants, and can lead them

to spots more productive of food? Anatomists say that rooks, by reason,

of two large nerves which run down between the eyes into the upper

mandible, have a more delicate feeling in their beaks than other

round-billed birds, and can grope for their meat when out of sight.

Perhaps then their associates attend them on the motive of interest, as

greyhounds wait on the motions of their finders; and as lions are said

to do on the yelpings of jackals. Lapwings and starlings sometimes

associate.

Letter XII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

March 9, 1772.

Dear Sir,

As a gentleman and myself were walking on the fourth of last November

round the sea-banks at Newhaven, near the mouth of the Lewes river, in

pursuit of natural knowledge, we were surprised to see three

house-swallows gliding very swiftly by us. That morning was rather

chilly, with the wind at north-west; but the tenor of the weather for

some time before had been delicate, and the noons remarkably warm. From

this incident, and from repeated accounts which I meet with, I am more

and more induced to believe that many of the swallow kind do not depart

from this island; but lay themselves up in holes and caverns; and do,

insect-like and bat-like, come forth at mild times, and than retire

again to their latebrae. Nor make I the least doubt but that, if I

lived at Newhaven, Seaford, Brighthelmstone, or any of those towns near

the chalk-cliffs of the Sussex coast, by proper observations, I should

see swallows stirring at periods of the winter, when the noons were

soft and inviting, and the sun warm and invigorating. And I am the more

of this opinion from what I have remarked during some of our late

springs, that though some swallows did make their appearance about the

usual time, viz., the thirteenth or fourteenth of April, yet meeting

with an harsh reception, and blustering cold north-east winds, they

immediately withdrew, absconding for several days, till the weather

gave them better encouragement.

Letter XIII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

April 12, 1772.

Dear Sir,

While I was in Sussex last autumn my residence was at the village near

Lewes, from whence I had formerly the pleasure of writing to you. On

the first of November I remarked that the old tortoise, formerly

mentioned, began first to dig the ground in order to the forming its

hybernaculum, which it had fixed on just beside a great tuft of

hepaticas. It scrapes out the ground with its fore-feet, and throws it

up over its back with its hind; but the motion of its legs is

ridiculously slow, little exceeding the hour-hand of a clock; and

suitable to the composure of an animal said to be a whole month in

performing one feat of copulation. Nothing can be more assiduous than

this creature night and day in scooping the earth, and forcing its

great body into the cavity; but, as the noons of that season proved

unusually warm and sunny, it was continually interrupted, and called

forth by the heat in the middle of the day; and though I continued

there till the thirteenth of November, yet the work remained

unfinished. Harsher weather, and frosty mornings, would have quickened

its operations. No part of its behaviour ever struck me more than the

extreme timidity it always expresses with regard to rain; for though it

has a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart,

yet does it discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in

all her best attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings, and

running its head up in a corner. If attended to, it becomes an

excellent weather-glass; for as sure as it walks elate, and as it were

on tiptoe, feeding with great earnestness in a morning, so sure will it

rain before night. It is totally a diurnal animal, and never pretends

to stir after it becomes dark. The tortoise, like other reptiles, has

an arbitrary stomach as well as lungs; and can refrain from eating as

well as breathing for a great part of the year. When first awakened it

eats nothing; nor again in the autumn before it retires: through the

height of the summer it feeds voraciously, devouring all the food that

comes in its way. I was much taken with its sagacity in discerning

those that do it kind offices; for, as soon as the good old lady comes

in sight who has waited on it for more than thirty years, it hobbles

towards its benefactress with awkward alacrity; but remains inattentive

to strangers. Thus not only ‘the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass has

master’s crib,’* but the most abject reptile and torpid of beings

distinguishes the hand that feeds it, and is touched with the feelings

of gratitude!

* Isaiah i. 3.

I am, etc., etc.

P.S. In about three days after I left Sussex the tortoise retired into

the ground under the hepatica.

Letter XIV

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, March 26, 1773.

Dear Sir,

The more I reflect on the στοργὴ of animals, the more I am astonished

at its effects. Nor is the violence of this affection more wonderful

than the shortness of its duration. Thus every hen is in her turn the

virago of the yard, in proportion to the helplessness of her brood; and

will fly in the face of a dog or a sow in defence of those chickens,

which in a few weeks she will drive before her with relentless cruelty.

This affection sublimes the passions, quickens the invention, and

sharpens the sagacity of the brute creation. Thus an hen, just become a

mother, is no longer that placid bird she used to be, but with feathers

standing on end, wings hovering, and clocking note, she runs about like

one possessed. Dams will throw themselves in the way of the greatest

danger in order to avert it from their progeny. Thus a partridge will

tumble along before a sportsman in order to draw away the dogs from her

helpless covey. In the time of nidification the most feeble birds will

assault the most rapacious. All the hirundines of a village are up in

arms at the sight of an hawk, whom they will persecute till he leaves

that district. A very exact observer has often remarked that a pair of

ravens nesting in the rock of Gibraltar would suffer no vulture or

eagle to rest near their station, but would drive them from the hill

with an amazing fury: even the blue thrush at the season of breeding

would dart out from the clefts of the rocks to chase away the kestril,

or the sparrow-hawk. If you stand near the nest of a bird that has

young, she will not be induced to betray them by an inadvertent

fondness, but will wait about at a distance with meat in her mouth for

an hour together.

Should I farther corroborate what I have advanced above by some

anecdotes which I probably may have mentioned before in conversation,

yet you will, I trust, pardon the repetition for the sake of

illustration.

The fly-catcher of the Zoology (the stoparola of Ray), builds every

year in the vines that grow on the walls of my house. A pair of these

little birds had one year inadvertently placed their nest on a naked

bough, perhaps in a shady time, not being aware of the inconvenience

that followed. But an hot sunny season coming on before the brood was

half fledged, the reflection of the wall became insupportable, and must

inevitably have destroyed the tender young, had not affection suggested

an expedient, and prompted the parent-birds to hover over the nest all

the hotter hours, while with wings expanded, and mouths gaping for

breath, they screened off the heat from their suffering offspring.

A farther instance I once saw of notable sagacity in a willow-wren,

which had built in a bank in my fields. This bird a friend and myself

had observed as she sat in her nest; but were particularly careful not

to disturb her, though we saw she eyed us with some degree of jealousy.

Some days after as we passed that way we were desirous of remarking how

this brood went on; but no nest could be found, till I happened to take

up a large bundle of long green moss, as it were, carelessly thrown

over the nest, in order to dodge the eye of any impertinent intruder.

A still more remarkable mixture of sagacity and instinct occurred to me

one day as my people were pulling off the lining of an hotbed, in order

to add some fresh dung. From out of the side of this bed leaped an

animal with great agility that made a most grotesque figure; nor was it

without great difficulty that it could be taken; when it proved to be a

large white-bellied field-mouse with three or four young clinging to

her teats by their mouths and feet. It was amazing that the desultory

and rapid motions of this dam should not oblige her litter to quit

their hold, especially when it appeared that they were so young as to

be both naked and blind!

To these instances of tender attachment, many more of which might be

daily discovered by those that are studious of nature, may be opposed

that rage of affection, that monstrous perversion of the στοργὴ, which

induces some females of the brute creation to devour their young

because their owners have handled them too freely, or removed them from

place to place! Swine, and sometimes the more gentle race of dogs and

cats, are guilty of this horrid and preposterous murder. When I hear

now and then of an abandoned mother that destroys her offspring, I am

not so much amazed; since reason perverted, and the bad passions let

loose, are capable of any enormity: but why the parental feelings of

brutes, that usually flow in one most uniform tenor, should sometimes

be so extravagantly diverted, I leave to abler philosophers than myself

to determine.

I am, etc.

Letter XV

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, July 8, 1773.

Dear Sir,

Some young men went down lately to a pond on the verge of Wolmer-forest

to hunt flappers, or young wild-ducks, many of which they caught, and,

among the rest, some very minute yet well-fledged wild-fowls alive,

which, upon examination, I found to be teals. I did not know till then

that teals ever bred in the south of England, and was much pleased with

the discovery: this I look upon as a great stroke in natural history.

We have had, ever since I can remember, a pair of white owls that

constantly breed under the eaves of this church. As I have paid good

attention to the manner of life of these birds during their season of

breeding, which lasts the summer through, the following remarks may not

perhaps be unacceptable: — About an hour before sunset (for then the

mice begin to run) they sally forth in quest of prey, and hunt all

round the hedges of meadows and small enclosures for them, which seem

to be their only food. In this irregular country we can stand on an

eminence and see them beat the fields over like a setting-dog, and

often drop down in the grass or corn. I have minuted these birds with

my watch for an hour together, and have found that they return to their

nests, the one or the other of them, about once in five minutes;

reflecting at the same time on the adroitness that every animal is

possessed of as regards the well-being of itself and offspring. But a

piece of address, which they show when they return loaded, should not,

I think, be passed over in silence. — As they take their prey with

their claws, so they carry it in their claws to their nest: but, as the

feet are necessary in their ascent under the tiles, they constantly

perch first on the roof of the chancel, and shift the mouse from their

claws to their bill, that the feet may be at liberty to take hold of

the plate on the wall as they are rising under the eaves.

White owls seem not (but in this I am not positive) to hoot at all: all

that clamorous hooting appears to me to come from the wood kinds. The

white owl does indeed snore and hiss in a tremendous manner; and these

menaces well answer the intention of intimidating: for I have known a

whole village up in arms on such an occasion, imagining the church-yard

to be full of goblins and spectres. White owls also often scream

horribly as they fly along; from this screaming probably arose the

common people’s imaginary species of screech-owl, which they

superstitiously think attends the windows of dying persons. The plumage

of the remiges of the wings of every species of owl that I have yet

examined is remarkably soft and pliant. Perhaps it may be necessary

that the wings of these birds should not make much resistance or

rushing, that they may be enabled to steal through the air unheard upon

a nimble and watchful quarry.

While I am talking of owls, it may not be improper to mention what I

was told by a gentleman of the county of Wilts. As they were grubbing a

vast hollow pollard-ash that had been the mansion of owls for

centuries, he discovered at the bottom a mass of matter that at first

he could not account for. After examination, he found it was a

congeries of the bones of mice (and perhaps of birds and bats) that had

been heaping together for ages, being cast up in pellets out of the

crops of many generations of inhabitants. For owls cast up the bones,

fur, and feathers of what they devour, after the manner of hawks. He

believes, he told me, that there were bushels of this kind of

substance.

When brown owls hoot their throats swell as big as an hen’s egg. I have

known an owl of this species live a full year without any water.

Perhaps the case may be the same with all birds of prey. When owls fly

they stretch out their legs behind them as a balance to their large

heavy heads; for as most nocturnal birds have large eyes and ears they

must have large heads to contain them. Large eyes I presume are

necessary to collect every ray of light, and large concave ears to

command the smallest degree of sound or noise.

I am, etc.

The hirundines are a most inoffensive, harmless, entertaining, social,

and useful tribe of birds: they touch no fruit in our gardens; delight,

all except one species, in attaching themselves to our houses; amuse us

with their migrations, songs, and marvellous agility; and clear our

outlets from the annoyances of gnats and other troublesome insects.

Some districts in the south seas, near Guiaquil,* are desolated, it

seems, by the infinite swarms of venomous mosquitoes, which fill the

air, and render those coasts insupportable. It would be worth inquiring

whether any species of hirundines is found in those regions. Whoever

contemplates the myriads of insects that sport in the sunbeams of a

summer evening in this country, will soon be convinced to what a degree

our atmosphere would be choked with them was it not for the friendly

interposition of the swallow tribe.

* See Ulloa’s Travels.

Many species of birds have their particular lice; but the hirundines

alone seem to be annoyed with dipterous insects, which infest every

species, and are so large, in proportion to themselves, that they must

be truly irksome and injurious to them. These are the hippoboscae

hirundinis with narrow subulated wings, abounding in every nest; and

are hatched by the warmth of the bird’s own body during incubation, and

crawl about under its feathers.

A species of them is familiar to horsemen in the south of England under

the name of forest-fly; and, to some, of side-fly, from its running

sideways like a crab. It creeps under the tails, and about the groins,

of horses, which, at their first coming out of the north, are rendered

half frantic by the tickling sensation; while our own breed little

regards them.

The curious Reaumur discovered the large eggs, or rather pupae, of

these flies as big as the flies themselves, which he hatched in his own

bosom. Any person that will take the troupe to examine the old nests of

either species of swallows may find in them the black shining cases of

the pupae of these insects: but for other particulars, too long for

this place, we refer the reader to L’Histoire d’Insectes of that

admirable entomologist. Tom. iv. pi. ii.

Letter XVI

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Nov. 20, 1773.

Dear Sir,

In obedience to your injunctions I sit down to give you some account of

the house-martin, or martlet; and, if my monography of this little

domestic and familiar bird should happen to meet with your approbation,

I may probably soon extend my inquiries to the rest of the British

hirundines — the swallow, the swift, and the bank-martin.

A few house-martins begin to appear about the sixteenth of April;

usually some few days later than the swallow. For some time after they

appear the hirundines in general pay no attention to the business of

nidification, but play and sport about either to recruit from the

fatigue of their journey, if they do migrate at all, or else that their

blood may recover its true tone and texture after it has been so long

benumbed by the severities of winter. About the middle of May, if the

weather be fine, the martin begins to think in earnest of providing a

mansion for its family. The crust or shell of this nest seems to be

formed of such dirt or loam as comes most readily to hand, and is

tempered and wrought together with little bits of broken straws to

render it tough and tenacious. As this bird often builds against a

perpendicular wall without any projecting ledge under, it requires its

utmost efforts to get the first foundation firmly fixed, so that it may

safely carry the superstructure. On this occasion the bird not only

clings with its claws, but partly supports itself by strongly inclining

its tail against the wall, making that a fulcrum; and thus steadied it

works and plasters the materials into the face of the brick or stone.

But then, that this work may not, while it is soft and green, pull

itself down by its own weight, the provident architect has prudence and

forbearance enough not to advance her work too fast; but by building

only in the morning, and by dedicating the rest of the day to food and

amusement, gives it sufficient time to dry and harden. About half an

inch seems to be a sufficient layer for a day. Thus careful workmen

when they build mud-walls (informed at first perhaps by this lithe

bird) raise but a moderate layer at a time, and then desist; lest the

work should become top-heavy, and so be ruined by is own weight. By

this method in about ten or twelve days is formed an hemispheric nest

with a small aperture towards the top, strong, compact, and warm; and

perfectly fitted for all the purposes for which it was intended. But

then nothing is more common than for the house-sparrow, as soon as the

shell is finished, to seize on it as is own, to eject the owner, and to

line it after is own manner.

After so much labour is bestowed in erecting a mansion, as nature

seldom works in vain, martins win breed on for several years together

in the same nest, where it happens to be well sheltered and secure from

the injuries of weather. The shed or crust of the nest is a sort of

rustic work full of knobs and protuberances on the outside: nor is the

inside of those that I have examined smoothed with any exactness at

all; but is rendered soft and warm, and fit for incubation, by a lining

of small straws, grasses, and feathers, and sometimes by a bed of moss

interwoven with wool. In this nest they tread, or engender, frequently

during the time of building; and the hen lays from three to five white

eggs.

At first when the young are hatched, and are in a naked and helpless

condition, the parent birds, with tender assiduity, carry out what

comes away from their young. Was it not for this affectionate

cleanliness the nestlings would soon be burnt up, and destroyed in so

deep and hollow a nest, by their own caustic excrement. In the

quadruped creation the same neat precaution is made use of;

particularly among dogs and cats, where the dams lick away what

proceeds from their young. But in birds there seems to be a particular

provision, that the dung of nestlings is enveloped into a tough kind of

jelly, and therefore is the easier conveyed off without soiling or

daubing. Yet, as nature is cleanly in all her ways, the young perform

this office for themselves in a little time by thrusting their tails

out at the aperture of their nest. As the young of small birds

presently arrive at their ἡλικία or full growth, they soon become

impatient of confinement, and sit all day with their heads out at the

orifice, where the dams, by clinging to the nest, supply them with food

from morning to night. For a time the young are fed on the wing by

their parents; but the feat is done by so quick and almost

imperceptible a sleight, that a person must have attended very exactly

to their motions before he would be able to perceive it. As soon as the

young are able to shift for themselves, the dams immediately turn their

thoughts to the business of a second brood: while the first flight,

shaken off and rejected by their nurses, congregate in great flocks,

and are the birds that are seen clustering and hovering on sunny

mornings and evenings round towers and steeples, and on the mobs of

churches and houses. These congregations usually begin to take place

about the first week in August; and therefore we may conclude that by

that time the first flight is pretty well over. The young of this

species do not quit their abodes all together; but the more forward

birds get abroad some days before the rest. These approaching the eaves

of buildings, and playing about before them, make people think that

several old ones attend one nest. They are often capricious in fixing

on a nesting place, beginning many edifices, and leaving them

unfinished; but when once a nest is completed in a sheltered place, it

serves for several seasons. Those which breed in a ready finished house

get the start in hatching of those that build new by ten days or a

fortnight. These industrious artificers are at their labours in the

long days before four in the morning: when they fix than materials they

plaster them on with their chins, moving their heads with a quick

vibratory motion. They dip and wash as they fly sometimes in very hot

weather, but not so frequency as swallows. It has been observed that

martins usually build to a north-east or north-west aspect, that the

heat of the sun may not crack and destroy their nests: but instances

are also remembered where they bred for many years in vast abundance in

an hot stifled inn-yard, against a wall facing to the south.

Birds in general are wise in their choice of situation: but in this

neighbourhood every summer is seen a strong proof to the contrary at an

house without eaves in an exposed district, where some martins build

year by year in the corners of the windows. But, as the corners of

these windows (which face to the south-east and south-west) are too

shallow, the nests are washed down every hard rain; and yet these birds

drudge on to no purpose from summer to summer, without changing their

aspect or house. It is a piteous sight to see them labouring when half

their nest is washed away and bringing dirt …. ‘generis lapsi sarcire

ruinas.’ Thus is instinct a most wonderful unequal faculty; in some

instances so much above reason, in other respects so far below it!

Martins love to frequent towns, especially if there are great lakes and

rivers at hand; nay, they even affect the close air of London. And I

have not only seen them nesting in the Borough, but even in the Strand

and Fleet-street; but then it was obvious from the dinginess of their

aspect that their feathers partook of the filth of that sooty

atmosphere. Martins are by far the least agile of the four species;

their wings and tails are short, and therefore they are not capable of

such surprising turns and quick and glancing evolutions as the swallow.

Accordingly they make use of a placid easy motion in a middle region of

the air, seldom mounting to any great height, and never sweeping long

together over the surface of the ground or water. They do not wander

far for food, but affect sheltered districts, over some lake, or under

some hanging wood, or in some hollow vale, especially in windy weather.

They breed the latest of all the swallow kind: in 1772 they had

nestlings on to October the twenty-first, and are never without

unfledged young as late as Michaelmas.

As the summer declines the congregating docks increase in numbers daily

by the constant accession of the second broods, till at last they swarm

in myriads upon myriads round the villages on the Thames, darkening the

face of the sky as they frequent the aits of that river, where they

roost. They retire, the bulk of them I mean, in vast flocks together

about the beginning of October: but have appeared of late years in a

considerable eight in this neighbourhood, for one day or two, as late

as November the third and sixth, after they were supposed to have been

gone for more than a fortnight. They therefore withdraw with us the

latest of any species. Unless these birds ate very short-lived indeed,

or unless they do not return to the district where they are bred, they

must undergo vast devastations somehow, sad somewhere; for the birds

that return yearly bear no manner of proportion to the birds that

retire.

House-martins ate distinguished from that congeners by having that legs

coveted with soft downy feathers down to their toes. They are no

songsters, but twitter in a pretty inward soft manner in their nests.

During the time of breeding they are often greatly molested with fleas.

I am, etc.

Letter XVII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Ringmer, near Lewes, Dec. 9, 1773.

Dear Sir,

I received your last favour just as I was setting out for this place;

and am pleased to find that my monography met with your approbation. My

remarks are the result of many years’ observation; and are, I trust,

true on the whole: though I do not pretend to say that they are

perfectly void of mistake, or that a more nice observer ought not make

many additions, since subjects of this kind are inexhaustible.

If you think my letter worthy the notice of your respectable society,

you are at liberty to lay it before them; and they win consider it, I

hope, as it was intended, as an humble attempt to promote a more minute

inquiry into natural history; into the life and conversation of

animals. Perhaps hereafter I may be induced to take the house-swallow

under consideration, and from that proceed to the rest of the British

hirundines.

Though I have now travelled the Sussex-downs upwards of thirty years,

yet I still investigate that chain of majestic mountains with fresh

admiration year by year; and think I see new beauties every time I

traverse it. This range, which runs from Chichester eastward as far as

East-Bourn, is about sixty miles in length, and is called the South

Downs, properly speaking, only round Lewes. As you pass along you

command a noble view of the wild, or weald, on one hand, and the broad

downs and sea on the other. Mr. Ray used to visit a family* just at the

foot of these hips, and was so ravished with the prospect from

Plumpton-plain near Lewes, that he mentions those scopes in his Wisdom

of God in the Works of the Creation with the utmost satisfaction, and

thinks them equal to anything he had seen in the finest parts of

Europe.

* Mr. Courthope, of Danny.

For my own part, I think there is somewhat peculiarly sweet and amusing

in the shapely figured aspect of chalk-hills in preference to those of

stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and shapeless.

Perhaps I may be singular in my opinion, and not so happy as to convey

to you the same idea, but I never contemplate these mountains without

thinking I perceive somewhat analogous to growth in their gentle

swellings and smooch fungus-like protuberances, their fluted sides, and

regular hollows and slopes, that carry at once the air of vegetative

dilation and expansion…. Or was there ever a time when these immense

masses of calcareous matter were drown into fermentation by some

adventitious moisture; were raised and leavened into such shapes by

some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs

into the sky so much above the less animated clay of the wild below?

By what I can guess from the admeasurements of the hills that have been

taken round my house, I should suppose that these hills surmount the

wild at au average at about the rate of five hundred feet.

One thing is very remarkable as to the sheep: from the westward till

you get to the river Adur all the flocks have horns, and smooth white

faces, and white legs; and a hornless sheep is rarely to be seen: but

as soon as you pass the river eastward, and mount Beeding-hill, all the

flocks at once become hornless, or, as they call them, poll-sheep; and

have moreover black faces with a white tuft of wool on their foreheads,

and speckled and spotted legs: so that you would think that the flocks

of Laban were pasturing on one side of the stream, and the variegated

breed of his son-in-law Jacob were cantoned along on the other. And

this diversity holds good respectively on each side from the valley of

Bramber and Beeding to the eastward, and westward all the whole length

of the downs. If you talk with the shepherds on this subject, they tell

you that the case has been so from time immemorial: and smile at your

simplicity if you ask them whether the situation of these two different

breeds might not be reversed? However, an intelligent friend of mine

near Chichester is determined to try the experiment; and has this

autumn, at the hazard of being laughed at, introduced a parcel of

black-faced hornless rams among his horned western ewes. The

black-faced poll-sheep have the shortest legs and the finest wool.

As I had hardly ever before travelled these downs at so late a season

of the year, I was determined to keep as sharp a look-out as possible

so near the southern coast, with respect to the summer short-winged

birds of passage. We make great inquiries concerning the withdrawing of

the swallow kind, without examining enough into the causes why this

tribe is never to be seen in winter; for, entre nous, the disappearing

of the latter is more marvellous than that of the former, and much more

unaccountable. The hirundines, if they please, are certainly capable of

migration; and yet no doubt are often found in a torpid state: but

redstarts, nightingales, white-throats, black-caps, etc., etc., are

very ill provided for long flights; have never been once found, as I

ever heard of, in a torpid state, and yet can never be supposed, in

such troops, from year to year to dodge and elude the eyes of the

curious and inquisitive, which from day to day discern the other small

birds that are known to abide our winters. But, notwithstanding all my

care, I saw nothing like a summer bird of passage: and, what is more

strange, not one wheat-ear, though they abound so in the autumn as to

be a considerable perquisite to the shepherds that take them; and

though many are to be seen to my knowledge all the winter through in

many parts of the south of England. The most intelligent shepherds tell

me that some few of these birds appear on the downs in March, and then

withdraw to breed probably in warrens and stone-quarries: now and then

a nest is plowed up in a fallow on the downs under a furrow, but it is

thought a rarity. At the time of wheat-harvest they begin to be taken

in great numbers; are sent for sale in vast quantities to

Brighthelmstone and Tunbridge; and appear at the tables of all the

gentry that entertain with any degree of elegance. About Michaelmas

they retire and are seen no more till March. Though these birds are,

when in season, in great plenty on the south downs round Lewes, yet at

East-Bourn, which is the eastern extremity of those downs, they abound

much more. One thing is very remarkable — that though in the height of

the season so many hundreds of dozens are taken, yet they never are

seen to flock; and it is a rare thing to see more than three or four at

a time: so that there must be a perpetual flitting and constant

progressive succession. It does not appear that any wheat-ears are

taken to the westward of Houghton-bridge, which stands on the river

Arun.

I did not fail to look particularly after my new migration of

ring-ousels; and to take notice whether they continued on the downs to

this season of the year; as I had formerly remarked them in the month

of October all the way from Chichester to Lewes wherever there were any

shrubs and covert: but not one bird of this sort came within my

observation. I only saw a few larks and whin-chats, some rooks, and

several kites and buzzards.

About Midsummer a flight of cross-bills comes to the pine-groves about

this house, but never makes any long stay.

The old tortoise, that I have mentioned in a former letter, still

continues in this garden; and retired under ground about the twentieth

of November, and came out again for one day on the thirtieth: it lies

now buried in a wet swampy border under a wall facing to the south, and

is enveloped at present in mud and mire!

Here is a large rookery round this house, the inhabitants of which seem

to get their livelihood very easily; for they spend the greatest part

of the day on their nest-trees when the weather is mild. These rooks

retire every evening all the winter from this rookery, where they only

call by the way, as they are going to roost in deep woods: at the dawn

of day they always revisit their nest-trees, and are preceded a few

minutes by a flight of daws, that act, as it were, as their harbingers.

I am, etc.

Letter XVIII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Jan. 29, 1774.

Dear Sir,

The house-swallow, or chimney-swallow, is undoubtedly the first comer

of all the British hirundines; and appears in general on or about the

thirteenth of April, as I have remarked from many years’ observation.

Not but now and then a straggler is seen much earlier: and, in

particular, when I was a boy I observed a swallow for a whole day

together on a sunny warm Shrove Tuesday; which day could not fall out

later than the middle of March, and often happened early in February.

It is worth remarking that these birds are seen first about lakes and

mill-ponds; and it is also very particular, that if these early

visitors happen to find frost and snow, as was the case of the two

dreadful springs of 1770 and 1771, they immediately withdraw for a

time. A circumstance this much more in favour of hiding than migration;

since it is much more probable that a bird should retire to its

hybernaculum just at hand, than return for a week or two only to warmer

latitudes.

The swallow, though called the chimney-swallow, by no means builds

altogether in chimneys, but often within barns and out-houses against

the rafters; and so she did in Virgil’s time:

… Ante

Garrula quam tignis nidos suspendat hirundo.

In Sweden she builds in barns, and is called ladu swala, the

barn-swallow. Besides, in the warmer parts of Europe there are no

chimneys to houses, except they are English-built: in these countries

she constructs her nest in porches, and gateways, and galleries, and

open halls.

Here and there a bird may affect some odd, peculiar place; as we have

known a swallow build down the shaft of an old well, through which

chalk had been formerly drawn up for the purpose of manure: but in

general with us this hirundo breeds in chimneys; and loves to haunt

those stacks where there is a constant fire, no doubt for the sake of

warmth. Not that it can subsist in the immediate shaft where there is a

fire; but prefers one adjoining to that of the kitchen, and disregards

the perpetual smoke of that funnel, as I have often observed with some

degree of wonder.

Five or six or more feet down the chimney does this little bird begin

to form her nest about the middle of May, which consists, like that of

the house-martin, of a crust or shell composed of dirt or mud, mixed

with short pieces of straw to render it tough and permanent; with this

difference, that whereas the shell of the martin is nearly hemispheric,

that of the swallow is open at the top, and like half a deep dish: this

nest is lined with fine grasses, and feathers which are often collected

as they float in the air.

Wonderful is the address which this adroit bird shows all day long in

ascending and descending with security through so narrow a pass. When

hovering over the mouth of the funnel, the vibrations of her wings

acting on the confined air occasion a rumbling like thunder. It is not

improbable that the dam submits to this inconvenient situation so low

in the shaft, in order to secure her broods from rapacious birds, and

particularly from owls, which frequently fall down chimneys, perhaps in

attempting to get at these nestlings.

The swallow lays from four to six white eggs, dotted with red specks;

and brings out her first brood about the last week in June, or the

first week in July. The progressive method by which the young are

introduced into life is very amusing: first, they emerge from the shaft

with difficulty enough, and often fall down into the rooms below: for a

day or so they are fed on the chimney-top, and then are conducted to

the dead leafless bough of some tree, where, sitting in a row, they are

attended with great assiduity, and may then be called perchers. In a

day or two more they become flyers, but are still unable to take their

own food; therefore they play about near the place where the dams are

hawking for flies; and when a mouthful is collected, at a certain

signal given, the dam and the nestling advance, rising towards each

other, and meeting at an angle; the young one all the while uttering

such a little quick note of gratitude and complacency, that a person

must have paid very little regard to the wonders of nature that has not

often remarked this feat.

The dam betakes herself immediately to the business of a second brood

as soon as she is disengaged from her first; which at once associates

with the first broods of house-martins; and with them congregates,

clustering on sunny roofs, towers, and trees. This hirundo brings out

her second brood towards the middle and end of August.

All the summer long is the swallow a most instructive pattern of

unwearied industry and affection; for, from morning to night, while

there is a family to be supported, she spends the whole day in skimming

close to the ground, and exerting the most sudden turns and quick

evolutions. Avenues, and long walks under hedges, and pasture-fields,

and mown meadows where cattle graze, are her delight, especially if

there are trees interspersed; because in such spots insects most

abound. When a fly is taken a smart snap from her bill is heard,

resembling the noise at the shutting of a watch-case; but the motion of

the mandibles are too quick for the eye.

The swallow, probably the male bird, is the excubitor to house-martins,

and other little birds, announcing the approach of birds of prey. For

as soon as an hawk appears, with a shrill alarming note he calls all

the swallows and martins about him; who pursue in a body, and buffet

and strike their enemy till they have driven him from the village,

darting down from above on his back, and rising in a perpendicular line

in perfect security. This bird also will sound the alarm, and strike at

cats when they climb on the roofs of houses, or otherwise approach the

nests. Each species of hirundo drinks as it flies along, sipping the

surface of the water; but the swallow alone, in general, washes on the

wing, by dropping into a pool for many times together: in very hot

weather house-martins and bank-martins dip and wash a little.

The swallow is a delicate songster, and in soft sunny weather sings

both perching and flying; on trees in a kind of concert, and on

chimney-tops: is also a bold flyer, ranging to distant downs and

commons even in windy weather, which the other species seem much to

dislike; nay, even frequenting exposed sea-port towns, and making

little excursions over the salt water. Horsemen on wide downs are often

closely attended by a little party of swallows for miles together,

which plays before and behind them, sweeping around, and collecting all

the skulking insects that are roused by the trampling of the horses’

feet: when the wind blows hard, without this expedient, they are often

forced to settle to pick up their lurking prey.

This species feeds much on little coleoptera, as well as on gnats and

flies: and often settles on dug ground, or paths, for gravels to grind

and digest its food. Before they depart, for some weeks, to a bird,

they forsake houses and chimneys, and roost in trees; and usually

withdraw about the beginning of October; though some few stragglers may

appear on at times till the first week in November.

Some few pairs haunt the new and open streets of London next the

fields, but do not enter, like the house-martin, the close and crowded

parts of the city.

Both male and female are distinguished from their congeners by the

length and forkedness of their tails. They are undoubtedly the most

nimble of all the species: and when the male pursues the female in

amorous chase, they then go beyond their usual speed, and exert a

rapidity almost too quick for the eye to follow.

After this circumstantial detail of the life and discerning στοργὴ of

the swallow, I shall add, for your farther amusement, an anecdote or

two not much in favour of her sagacity:

A certain swallow built for two years together on the handles of a pair

of garden-shears, that were stuck up against the boards in an

out-house, and therefore must have her nest spoiled whenever that

implement was wanted: and, what is stranger still, another bird of the

same species built its nest on the wings and body of an owl that

happened by accident to hang dead and dry from the rafter of a barn.

This owl, with the nest on its wings, and with eggs in the nest, was

brought as a curiosity worthy the most elegant private museum in Great

Britain. The owner, struck with the oddity of the sight, furnished the

bringer with a large shell, or conch, desiring him to fix it just where

the owl hung: the person did as he was ordered, and the following year

a pair, probably the same pair, built their nest in the conch, and laid

their eggs.

The owl and the conch make a strange grotesque appearance, and are not

the least curious specimens in that wonderful collection of art and

nature.*

* Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum.

Thus is instinct in animals, taken the least out of its way, an

undistinguishing, limited faculty; and blind to every circumstance that

does not immediately respect self-preservation, or lead at once to the

propagation or support of their species.

I am,

With all respect, etc., etc.

Letter XIX

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Feb. 14, 1774.

Dear Sir,

I received your favour of the eighth, and am pleased to find that you

read my little history of the swallow with your usual candour: nor was

I less pleased to find that you made objections where you saw reason.

As to the quotations, it is difficult to say precisely which species of

hirundo Virgil might intend in the lines in question, since the

ancients did not attend to specific differences like modern

naturalists: yet somewhat may be gathered, enough to incline me to

suppose that in the two passages quoted the poet had his eye on the

swallow.

In the first place the epithet garrula suits the swallow well, who is a

great songster; but not the martin, which is rather a mute bird; and

when it sings is so inward as scarce to be heard. Besides, if tignum in

that place signifies a rafter rather than a beam, as it seems to me to

do, then I think it must be the swallow that is alluded to, and not the

martin; since the former does frequently build within the roof against

the rafters; while the latter always, as far as I have been able to

observe, builds without the roof against eaves and cornices.

As to the simile, too much stress must not be laid on it: yet the

epithet nigra speaks plainly in favour of the swallow, whose back and

wings are very black; while the rump of the martin is milk-white, its

back and wings blue, and all its under part white as snow. Nor can the

clumsy motions (comparatively clumsy) of the martin well represent the

sudden and artful evolutions and quick turns which Juturna gave to her

brother’s chariot, so as to elude the eager pursuit of the enraged

Aeneas. The verb sonat also seems to imply a bird that is somewhat

loquacious.*

* Nigra velut magnas domini cum divitis ædes

Pervolat, et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo,

Pabula parva legens, nidisque loquacibus escas:

Et nunc porticibus vacuis, nunc humida circum

Stagna sonat …

We have had a very wet autumn and winter, so as to raise the springs to

a pitch beyond any thing since 1764; which was a remarkable year for

floods and high waters. The land-springs, which we call lavants, break

out much on the downs of Sussex, Hampshire, and Wiltshire. The country

people say when the lavants rise corn will always be dear; meaning that

when the earth is so glutted with water as to send forth springs on the

downs and uplands, that the corn-vales must be drowned; and so it has

proved for these ten or eleven years past. For land-springs have never

obtained more since the memory of man than during that period; nor has

there been known a greater scarcity of all sorts of grain, considering

the great improvements of modern husbandry. Such a run of wet seasons a

century or two ago would, I am persuaded, have occasioned a famine.

Therefore pamphlets and newspaper letters, that talk of combinations,

tend to inflame and mislead; since we must not expect plenty till

Providence sends us more favourable seasons.

The wheat of last year, all round this district, and in the county of

Rutland, and elsewhere, yields remarkably bad: and our wheat on the

ground, by the continual late sudden vicissitudes from fierce frost to

pouring rains, looks poorly; and the turnips rot very fast.

Letter XX

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Feb. 26, 1774.

Dear Sir,

The sand-martin, or bank-martin, is by much the least of any of the

British hirundines; and, as far as we have ever seen, the smallest

known hirundo; though Brisson asserts that there is one much smaller,

and that is the hirundo esculenta.

But it is much to be regretted that it is scarce possible for any

observer to be so full and exact as he could wish in reciting the

circumstances attending the life and conversation of this little bird,

since it is fera natura, at least in this part of the kingdom,

disclaiming all domestic attachments, and haunting wild heaths and

commons where there are large lakes; while the other species,

especially the swallow and house-martin, are remarkably gentle and

domesticated, and never seem to think themselves safe but under the

protection of man.

Here are in this parish, in the sand-pits and banks of the lakes of

Wolmer-forest, several colonies of these birds; and yet they are never

seen in the village; nor do they at all frequent the cottages that are

scattered about in that wild district. The only instance I ever

remember where this species haunts any building is at the town of

Bishop’s Waltham, in this county, where many sand-martins nestle and

breed in the scaffold-holes of the back-wall of William of Wykeham’s

stables: but then this wall stands in a very sequestered and retired

enclosure, and faces upon a large and beautiful lake. And indeed this

species seems so to delight in large waters, that no instance occurs of

their abounding, but near vast pools or rivers: and in particular it

has been remarked that they swarm in the banks of the Thames in some

places below London-bridge.

It is curious to observe with what different degrees of architectonic

skill Providence has endowed birds of the same genus, and so nearly

correspondent in their general mode of life! for while the swallow and

the house-martin discover the greatest address in raising and securely

fixing crusts or shells of loam as cunabula for their young, the

bank-martin terebrates a round and regular hole in the sand or earth,

which is serpentine, horizontal, and about two feet deep. At the inner

end of this burrow does this bird deposit, in a good degree of safety,

her rude nest, consisting of fine grasses and feathers, usually

goose-feathers, very inartificially laid together.

Perseverance will accomplish anything: though at first one would be

disinclined to believe that this weak bird, with her soft and tender

bill and claws, should ever be able to bore the stubborn sand-bank

without entirely disabling herself; yet with these feeble instruments

have I seen a pair of them make great dispatch: and could remark how

much they had scooped that day by the fresh sand which ran down the

bank, and was of a different colour from that which lay loose and

bleached in the sun.

In what space of time these little artists are able to mine and finish

these cavities I have never been able to discover, for reasons given

above; but it would be a matter worthy of observation, where it falls

in the way of any naturalist to make his remarks. This I have often

taken notice of, that several holes of different depths are left

unfinished at the end of summer. To imagine that these beginnings were

intentionally made in order to be in the greater forwardness for next

spring, is allowing perhaps too much foresight and rerum prudentia to a

simple bird. May not the cause of these latebrae being left unfinished

arise from their meeting in those places with strata too harsh, hard,

and solid, for their purpose, which they relinquish, and go to a fresh

spot that works more freely ? Or may they not in other places fall in

with a soil as much too loose and mouldering, liable to flounder, and

threatening to overwhelm them and their labours ?

One thing is remarkable — that, after some years, the old holes are

forsaken and new ones bored; perhaps because the old habitations grow

foul and fetid from long use, or because they may so abound with fleas

as to become untenable. This species of swallow moreover is strangely

annoyed with fleas: and we have seen fleas, bed-fleas (pulex irritans),

swarming at the mouths of these holes, like bees upon the stools of

their hives.

The following circumstance should by no means be omitted — that these

birds do not make use of their caverns by way of hybernacula, as might

be expected; since banks so perforated have been dug out with care in

the winter, when nothing was found but empty nests.

The sand-martin arrives much about the same time with the swallow, and

lays, as she does, from four to six white eggs. But as the species is

cryptogame, carrying on the business of nidification, incubation, and

the support of its young in the dark, it would not be so easy to

ascertain the time of breeding, were it not for the coming forth of the

broods, which appear much about the time, or rather somewhat earlier

than those of the swallow. The nestlings are supported in common like

those of their congeners, with gnats and other small insects; and

sometimes they are fed with libellulae (dragon-flies) almost as long as

themselves. In the last week in June we have seen a row of these

sitting on a rail near a great pool as perchers; and so young and

helpless, as easily to be taken by hand: but whether the dams ever feed

them on the wing, as swallows and house-martins do, we have never yet

been able to determine; nor do we know whether they pursue and attack

birds of prey.

When they happen to breed near hedges and enclosures, they are

dispossessed of their breeding holes by the house-sparrow, which is on

the same account a fell adversary to house-martins.

These hirundines are no songsters, but rather mute, making only a

little harsh noise when a person approaches their nests. They seem not

to be of a sociable turn, never with us congregating with their

congeners in the autumn. Undoubtedly they breed a second time, like the

house-martin and swallow; and withdraw about Michaelmas.

Though in some particular districts they may happen to abound, yet in

the whole, in the south of England at least, is this much the rarest

species. For there are few towns or large villages but what abound with

house-martins; few churches, towers, or steeples, but what are haunted

by some swifts; scarce a hamlet or single cottage-chimney that has not

its swallow; while the bank-martins, scattered here and there, live a

sequestered life among some abrupt sand-hills, and in the banks of some

few rivers.

These birds have a peculiar manner of flying; flitting about with odd

jerks, and vacillations, not unlike the motions of a butterfly.

Doubtless the flight of all hirundines is influenced by, and adapted

to, the peculiar sort of insects which furnish their food. Hence it

would be worth inquiry to examine what particular group of insects

affords the principal food of each respective species of swallow.

Notwithstanding what has been advanced above, some few sand-martins, I

see, haunt the skirts of London, frequenting the dirty pools in Saint

George’s-Fields, and about White-Chapel. The question is where these

build, since there are no banks or bold shores in that neighbourhood:

perhaps they nestle in the scaffold-holes of some old or new deserted

building. They dip and wash as they fly sometimes, like the

house-martin and swallow.

Sand-martins differ from their congeners in the diminutiveness of their

size, and in their colour, which is what is usually called a

mouse-colour. Near Valencia in Spain, they are taken, says Willughby,

and sold in the markets for the table; and are called by the country

people, probably from their desultory jerking manner of flight,

Papilion de montagna.

Letter XXI

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Sept. 28, 1774.

Dear Sir,

As the swift or black-martin is the largest of the British hirundines,

so is it undoubtedly the latest comer. For I remember but one instance

of its appearing before the last week in April: and in some of our late

frosty, harsh springs, it has not been seen till the beginning of May.

This species usually arrives in pairs.

The swift, like the sand-martin, is very defective in architecture,

making no crust, or shell, for its nest; but forming it of dry grasses

and feathers, very rudely and inartificially put together. With all my

attention to these birds, I have never been able once to discover one

in the act of collecting or carrying in materials: so that I have

suspected (since their nests are exactly the same) that they sometimes

usurp upon the house-sparrows, and expel them, as sparrows do the house

and sand-martin; well remembering that I have seen them squabbling

together at the entrance of their holes; and the sparrows up in arms,

and much disconcerted at these intruders. And yet I am assured, by a

nice observer in such matters, that they do collect feathers for their

nests in Andalusia; and that he has shot them with such materials in

their mouths.

Swifts, like sand-martins, carry on the business of nidification quite

in the dark, in crannies of castles, and towers, and steeples, and upon

the tops of the walls of churches under the roof; and therefore cannot

be so narrowly watched as those species that build more openly: but,

from what I could ever observe, they begin nesting about the middle of

May; and I have remarked, from eggs taken, that they have sat hard by

the ninth of June. In general they haunt tall buildings, churches, and

steeples, and breed only in such: yet in this village some pairs

frequent the lowest and meanest cottages, and educate their young under

those thatched roofs. We remember but one instance where they breed out

of buildings; and that is in the sides of a deep chalk-pit near the

town of Odiham, in this county, where we have seen many pairs entering

the crevices, and skimming and squeaking round the precipices.

As I have regarded these amusive birds with no small attention, if I

should advance something new and peculiar with respect to them, and

different from all other birds, I might perhaps be credited; especially

as my assertion is the result of many years’ exact observation. The

fact that I would advance is, that swifts tread, or copulate, on the

wing: and I would wish any nice observer, that is startled at this

supposition, to use his own eyes, and I think he will soon be

convinced. In another class of animals, viz., the insect, nothing is so

common as to see the different species of many genera in conjunction as

they fly. The swift is almost continually on the wing; and as it never

settles on the ground, on trees, or roofs, would seldom find

opportunity for amorous rites, was it not enabled to indulge them in

the air. If any person would watch these birds of a fine morning in

May, as they are sailing round at a great height from the ground, he

would see, every now and then, one drop on the back of another, and

both of them sink down together for many fathoms with a loud piercing

shriek. This I take to be the juncture when the business of generation

is carrying on.

As the swift eats, drinks, collects materials for its nest, and, at it

seems, propagates on the wing; it appears to live more in the air than

any other bird, and to perform all functions there save those of

sleeping and incubation.

This hirundo differs widely from its congeners in laying invariably but

two eggs at a time, which are milk-white, long, and peaked at the small

end; whereas the other species lay at each brood from four to six. It

is a most alert bird, rising very early, and retiring to roost very

late; and is on the wing in the height of summer at least sixteen

hours. In the longest days it does not withdraw to rest till a quarter

before nine in the evening, being the latest of all day birds. Just

before they retire whole groups of them assemble high in the air, and

squeak, and shoot about with wonderful rapidity. But this bird is never

so much alive as in sultry thundry weather, when it expresses great

alacrity, and calls forth all its powers. In hot mornings several,

getting together in little parties, dash round the steeples and

churches, squeaking as they go in a very clamorous manner; these, by

nice observers, are supposed to be males, serenading their sitting

hens; and not without reason, since they seldom squeak till they come

close to the walls or eaves, and since those within utter at the same

time a little inward note of complacency.

When the hen has sat hard all day, she rushes forth just as it is

almost dark, and stretches and relieves her weary limbs, and snatches a

scanty meal for a few minutes, and then returns to her duty of

incubation. Swifts, when wantonly and cruelly shot while they have

young, discover a little lump of insects in their mouths, which they

pouch and hold under their tongue. In general they feed in a much

higher district than the other species; a proof that gnats and other

insects do also abound to a considerable height in the air: they also

range to vast distances; since locomotion is no labour to them, who are

endowed with such wonderful powers of wing. Their powers seem to be in

proportion to their levers; and their wings are longer in proportion

than those of almost any other bird. When they mute, or ease themselves

in flight, they raise their wings, and make them meet over their backs.

At some certain times in the summer I had remarked that swifts were

hawking very low for hours together over pools and streams; and could

not help inquiring into the object of their pursuit that induced them

to descend so much below their usual range. After some trouble, I found

that they were taking phryganeae, ephemerae, and libellulae

(cadew-flies, may-flies, and dragon-flies) that were just emerged out

of their aurelia state. I then no longer wondered that they should be

so willing to stoop for a prey that afforded them such plentiful and

succulent nourishment.

They bring out their young about the middle or latter end of July: but

as these never become perchers, nor, that ever I could discern, are fed

on the wing by their dams, the coming forth of the young is not so

notorious as in the other species.

On the thirtieth of last June I untiled the eaves of an house where

many pairs build, and found in each nest only two squab naked pulli: on

the eighth of July I repeated the same inquiry, and found they had made

very little progress towards a fledged state, but were still naked and

helpless. From whence we may conclude that birds whose way of life

keeps them perpetually on the wing would not be able to quit their nest

till the end of the month. Swallows and martins, that have numerous

families, are continually feeding them every two or three minutes;

while swifts, that have but two young to maintain, are much at their

leisure, and do not attend on their nests for hours together.

Sometimes they pursue and strike at hawks that come in their way; but

not with that vehemence and fury that swallows express on the same

occasion. They are out all day long in wet days, feeding about, and

disregarding still rain: from whence two things may be gathered; first,

that many insects abide high in the air, even in rain; and next, that

the feathers of these birds must be well preened to resist so much wet.

Windy, and particularly windy weather with heavy showers, they dislike;

and on such days withdraw, and are scarce ever seen.

There is a circumstance respecting the colour of swifts, which seems

not to be unworthy our attention. When they arrive in the spring they

are all over of a glossy, dark soot-colour, except their chins, which

are white; but, by being all day long in the sun and air, they become

quite weather-beaten and bleached before they depart, and yet they

return glossy again in the spring. Now, if they pursue the sun into

lower latitudes, as some suppose, in order to enjoy a perpetual summer,

why do they not return bleached ? Do they not rather perhaps retire to

rest for a season, and at that juncture moult and change their

feathers, since all other birds are known to moult soon after the

season of breeding?

Swifts are very anomalous in many particulars, dissenting from all

their congeners not only in the number of their young, but in breeding

but once in a summer; whereas all the other British hirundines breed

invariably twice. It is past all doubt that swifts can breed but once,

since they withdraw in a short time after the flight of their young,

and some time before their congeners bring out their second brood. We

may here remark, that, as swifts breed but once in a summer, and only

two at a time, and the other hirundines twice, the latter, who lay from

four to six eggs, increase at an average five times as fast as the

former.

But in nothing are swifts more singular than in their early retreat.

They retire, as to the main body of them, by the tenth of August, and

sometimes a few days sooner: and every straggler invariably withdraws

by the twentieth, while their congeners, all of them, stay till the

beginning of October; many of them all through that month, and some

occasionally to the beginning of November. This early retreat is

mysterious and wonderful, since that time is often the sweetest season

in the year. But, what is more extraordinary, they begin to retire

still earlier in the most southerly parts of Andalusia, where they can

be no ways influenced by any defect of heat; or, as one might suppose,

defect of food. Are they regulated in their motions with us by a

failure of food, or by a propensity to moulting, or by a disposition to

rest after so rapid a life, or by what? This is one of those incidents

in natural history that not only baffles our searches, but almost

eludes our guesses!

These hirundines never perch on trees or roofs, and so never congregate

with their congeners. They are fearless while haunting their nesting

places, and are not to be scared with a gun; and are often beaten down

with poles and cudgels as they stoop to go under the eaves. Swifts are

much infested with those pests to the genus called hippoboscae

hirundinis; and often wriggle and scratch themselves, in their flight,

to get rid of that clinging annoyance.

Swifts are no songsters, and have only one harsh screaming note; yet

there are ears to which it is not displeasing, from an agreeable

association of ideas, since that note never occurs but in the most

lovely summer weather.

They never settle on the ground but through accident; and when down can

hardly rise, on account of the shortness of their legs and the length

of their wings: neither can they walk, but only crawl; but they have a

strong grasp with their feet, by which they cling to walls. Their

bodies being flat they can enter a very narrow crevice; and where they

cannot pass on their bellies they will turn up edgewise.

The particular formation of the foot discriminates the swift from all

British hirundines; and indeed from all other known birds, the hirundo

melba, great white-bellied swift of Gibraltar, excepted; for it is so

disposed as to carry ‘omnes quatuor digitos anticos’ all its four toes

forward; besides, the least toe, which should be the back-toe, consists

of one bone alone, and the other three only of two apiece. A

construction most rare and peculiar, but nicely adapted to the purposes

in which their feet are employed. This, and some peculiarities

attending the nostrils and under mandible, have induced a discerning

naturalist* to suppose that this species might constitute a genus per

se.

* John Antony Scopoli, of Carniola, M.D.

In London a party of swifts frequents the Tower, playing and feeding

over the river just below the bridge; others haunt some of the churches

of the Borough next the fields; but do not venture, like the

house-martin, into the close crowded part of the town.

The Swedes have bestowed a very pertinent name on this swallow, calling

it ring swala, form the perpetual rings or circles that it takes round

the scene of its nidification.

Swifts feed on coleoptera, or small beetles with hard cases over their

wings, as well as on the softer insects; but it does not appear how

they can procure gravel to grind their food, as swallows do, since they

never settle on the ground. Young ones, over-run with hippoboscae, are

sometimes found, under their nests, fallen to the ground: the number of

vermin rendering their abode insupportable any longer. They frequent in

this village several abject cottages: yet a succession still haunts the

same unlikely roofs: a good proof this that the same birds return to

the same spots. As they must stoop very low to get up under these

humble eaves, cats lie in wait, and sometimes catch them on the wing.

On the fifth of July, 1775, I again untiled part of a roof over the

nest of a swift. The dam sat in the nest; but so strongly was she

affected by natural στοργὴ for her brood, which she supposed to be in

danger, that, regardless of her own safety, she would not stir, but lay

sullenly by them, permitting herself to be taken in hand. The squab

young we brought down and placed on the grass-plot, where they tumbled

about, and were as helpless as a new-born child. While we contemplated

their naked bodies, their unwieldy disproportioned abdomina, and their

heads, too heavy for their necks to support, we could not but wonder

when we reflected that these shiftless beings in a little more than a

fortnight would be able to dash through the air almost with the

inconceivable swiftness of a meteor; and perhaps, in their emigration

must traverse vast continents and oceans as distant as the equator. So

soon does nature advance small birds to their ἡλικία or state of

perfection; while the progressive growth of men and large quadrupeds is

slow and tedious!

I am, etc.

Letter XXII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Sept. 13, 1774.

Dear Sir,

By means of a straight cottage chimney I had an opportunity this summer

of remarking, at my leisure, how swallows ascend and descend through

the shaft; but my pleasure, in contemplating the address with which

this feat was performed to a consideraable depth in the chimney, was

somewhat interrupted by apprehensions lest my eyes might undergo the

same fate with those of Tobit.*

* Tobit ii. 10.

Perhaps it may be some amusement to you to hear at what times the

different species of hirundines arrived this spring in three very

distant counties of this kingdom. With us the swallow was seen first on

April the 4th, the swift on April the 24th, the bank-martin on April

the 12th, and the house-martin not till April the 30th. At South Zele,

Devonshire, swallows did not arrive till April the 25th; swifts, in

plenty, on May the 1st; and house-martins not till the middle of May.

At Blackburn, in Lancashire, swifts were seen April the 28th, swallows

April the 29th, house-martins May the 1st. Do these different dates, in

such distant districts, prove anything for or against migration ?

A farmer, near Weyhill, fallows his land with two teams of asses; one

of which works till noon, and the other in the afternoon. When these

animals have done their work, they are penned, all night, like sheep,

on the fallow. In the winter they are confined and foddered in a yard,

and make plenty of dung.

Linnaeus says that hawks ‘paciscuntur inducias cum avibus, quamdiu

cuculus cuculat’ but it appears to me that, during that period, many

little birds are taken and destroyed by birds of prey, as may be seen

by their feathers left in lanes and under hedges.

The missel-thrush is, while breeding, fierce and pugnacious, driving

such birds as approach its nest, with great fury, to a distance. The

Welch call it pen y llwyn, the head or master of the coppice. He

suffers no magpie, jay, or blackbird, to enter the garden where he

haunts; and is, for the time, a good guard to the new-sown legumens. In

general he is very successful in the defence of his family: but once I

observed in my garden, that several magpies came determined to storm

the nest of a missel-thrush: the dams defended their mansion with great

vigour, and fought resolutely pro aris & focis; but numbers at last

prevailed, they tore the nest to pieces, and swallowed the young alive.

In the season of notification the wildest birds are comparatively tame.

Thus the ring-dove breeds in my fields, though they are continually

frequented; and the missel-thrush, though most shy and wild in the

autumn and winter, builds in my garden close to a walk where people are

passing all day long.

Wall-fruit abounds with me this year: but my grapes, that used to be

forward and good, are at present backward beyond all precedent: and

this is not the worst of the story; for the same ungenial weather, the

same black cold solstice, has injured the more necessary fruits of the

earth, and discoloured and blighted our wheat. The crop of hops

promises to be very large.

Frequent returns of deafness incommode me sadly, and half disqualify me

for a naturalist; for, when those fits are upon me, I lose all the

pleasing notices and little intimations arising from rural sounds: and

May is to me as silent and mute with respect to the notes of birds,

etc., as August. My eyesight is, thank God, quick and good; but with

respect to the other sense, I am, at times, disabled:

And Wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

Letter XXIII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, June 8, 1775.

Dear Sir,

On September the 21st, 1741, being then on a visit, and intent on

field-diversions, I rose before daybreak: when I came into the

enclosures, I found the stubbles and clover-grounds matted all over

with a thick coat of cobweb, in the meshes of which a copious and heavy

dew hung so plentifully that the whole face of the country seemed, as

it were, covered with two or three setting-nets drawn one over another.

When the dogs attempted to hunt, their eyes were so blinded and

hoodwinked that they could not proceed, but were obliged to lie down

and scrape the incumbrances from their faces with their fore-feet, so

that, finding my sport interrupted, I returned home musing in my mind

on the oddness of the occurrence.

As the morning advanced the sun became bright and warm, and the day

turned out one of those most lovely ones which no season but the autumn

produces; cloudless, calm, serene, and worthy of the South of France

itself.

About nine an appearance very unusual began to demand our attention, a

shower of cobwebs falling from very elevated regions, and continuing,

without any interruption, till the close of the day. These webs were

not single filmy threads, floating in the air in all directions, but

perfect flakes or rags; some near an inch broad, and five or six long,

which fell with a degree of velocity which showed they were

considerably heavier than the atmosphere.

On every side as the observer turned his eyes might he behold a

continual succession of fresh flakes falling into his sight, and

twinkling like stars as they turned their sides towards the sun.

How far this wonderful shower extended would be difficult to say; but

we know that it reached Bradley, Selborne, and Alresford, three places

which lie in a sort of a triangle, the shortest of whose sides is about

eight miles in extent.

At the second of those places there was a gentleman (for whose veracity

and intelligent turn we have the greatest veneration) who observed it

the moment he got abroad; but concluded that, as soon as he came upon

the hill above his house, where he took his morning rides, he should be

higher than this meteor, which he imagined might have been blown, like

thistle-down, from the common above: but, to his great astonishment,

when he rode to the most elevated part of the down, 300 feet above his

fields, he found the webs in appearance still as much above him as

before; still descending into sight in a constant succession, and

twinkling in the sun, so as to draw the attention of the most

incurious.

Neither before nor after was any such fall observed; but on this day

the flakes hung in the trees and hedges so thick, that a diligent

person sent out might have gathered baskets full.

The remark that I shall make on these cobweb-like appearances, called

gossamer, is, that, strange and superstitious as the notions about them

were formerly, nobody in these days doubts but that they are the real

production of small spiders, which swarm in the fields in fine weather

in autumn, and have a power of shooting out webs from their tails so as

to render themselves buoyant, and lighter than air. But why these

rapturous insects should that day take such a wonderful aerial

excursion, and why their webs should at once become so gross and

material as to be considerably more weighty than air, and to descend

with precipitation, is a matter beyond my skill. If I might be allowed

to hazard a supposition, I should imagine that those filmy threads,

when first shot, might be entangled in the rising dew, and so drawn up,

spiders and all, by a brisk evaporation into the region where clouds

are formed: and if the spiders have a power of coiling and thickening

their webs in the air, as Dr. Lister says they have [see his Letters to

Mr. Ray], then, when they were become heavier than the air, they must

fall.

Every day in fine weather, in autumn chiefly, do I see those spiders

shooting out their webs and mounting aloft: they will go off from your

finger if you will take them into your hand. Last summer one alighted

on my book as I was reading in the parlour; and, running to the top of

the page, and shooting out a web, took its departure from thence. But

what I most wondered at, was that it went off with considerable

velocity in a place where no air was stirring; and I am sure that I did

not assist it with my breath. So that these little crawlers seem to

have, while mounting, some loco-motive power without the use of wings,

and to move in the air, faster then the air itself.

Letter XXIV

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Aug. 15, 1775.

Dear Sir,

There is a wonderful spirit of sociality in the brute creation,

independent of sexual attachment: the congregating of gregarious birds

in the winter is a remarkable instance.

Many horses, though quiet with company, will not stay one minute in a

field by themselves: the strongest fences cannot restrain them. My

neighbour’s horse will not only not stay by himself abroad, but he will

not bear to be left alone in a strange stable without discovering the

utmost impatience, and endeavouring to break the rack and manger with

his fore feet. He has been known to leap out at a stable-window,

through which dung was thrown, after company; and yet in other respects

is remarkably quiet. Oxen and cows will not fatten by themselves; but

will neglect the finest pasture that is not recommended by society. It

would be needless to instance in sheep, which constantly flock

together.

But this propensity seems not to be confined to animals of the same

species; for we know a doe still alive, that was brought up from a

little fawn with a dairy of cows; with them it goes afield, and with

them it returns to the yard. The dogs of the house take no notice of

this deer, being used to her; but, if strange dogs come by, a chase

ensues; while the master smiles to see his favourite securely leading

her pursuers over hedge, or gate, or stile, till she returns to the

cows, who, with fierce longings and menacing horns, drive the

assailants quite out of the pasture.

Even great disparity of kind and size does not always prevent social

advances and mutual fellowship. For a very intelligent and observant

person has assured me that, in the former part of his life, keeping but

one horse, he happened also on a time to have but one solitary hen.

These two incongruous animals spent much of their time together in a

lonely orchard, where they saw no creature but each other. By degrees

an apparent regard began to take place between these two sequestered

individuals. The fowl would approach the quadruped with notes of

complacency, rubbing herself gently against his legs; while the horse

would look down with satisfaction, and move with the greatest caution

and circumspection, lest he should trample on his diminutive companion.

Thus, by mutual good offices, each seemed to console the vacant hours

of the other: so that Milton, when he puts the following sentiment in

the mouth of Adam, seems to be somewhat mistaken:

Much less can bird with beast, or fish with fowl,

So well converse, nor with the ox the ape.

I am, etc.

Letter XXV

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Oct. 2, 1775.

Dear Sir,

We have two gangs or hordes of gypsies which infest the south and west

of England, and come round in their circuit two or three times in the

year. One of these tribes calls itself by the noble name of Stanley, of

which I have nothing particular to say; but the other is distinguished

by an appellative somewhat remarkable. — As far as their harsh

gibberish can be understood, they seem to say that the name of their

clan is Curleople; now the termination of this word is apparently

Grecian: and as Mezeray and the gravest historians all agree that these

vagrants did certainly migrate from Egypt and the East two or three

centuries ago, and so spread by degrees over Europe, may not this name,

a little corrupted, be the very name they brought with them from the

Levant? It would be matter of some curiosity, could one meet with an

intelligent person among them, to inquire whether, in their jargon,

they still retain any Greek words: the Greek radicals will appear in

hand, foot, head, water, earth, etc. It is possible that amidst their

cant and corrupted dialect many mutilated remains of their native

language might still be discovered.

With regard to those peculiar people, the gypsies, one thing is very

remarkable, and especially as they came from warmer climates; and that

is, that while other beggars lodge in barns, stables, and cow-houses,

these sturdy savages seem to pride themselves in braving the severities

of winter, and in living sub dio the whole year round. Last September

was as wet a month as ever was known; and yet during those deluges did

a young gypsy-girl lie-in in the midst of one of our hop-gardens, on

the cold ground, with nothing over her but a piece of blanket extended

on a few hazel-rods bent hoop-fashion, and stuck into the earth at each

end, in circumstances too trying for a cow in the same condition: yet

within this garden there was a large hop-kiln, into the chambers of

which she might have retired, had she thought shelter an object worthy

her attention.

Europe itself, it seems, cannot set bounds to the rovings of those

vagabonds; for Mr. Bell, in his return from Peking, met a gang of these

people on the confines of Tartary, who were endeavouring to penetrate

those deserts and try their fortune in China.*

* See Bell’s Travels in China.

Gypsies are called in French, Bohemians; in Italian and modern Greek,

Zingari.

I am, etc.

Letter XXVI

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Nov. 1, 1775.

Dear Sir,

Hic … taedae pingues, hic plurimus ignis

Semper, et assidua postes fuligine nigri.

I shall make no apology for troubling you with the detail of a very

simple piece of domestic Economy, being satisfied that you think

nothing beneath your attention that tends to utility: the matter

alluded to is the use of rushes instead of candles, which I am well

aware prevails in many districts besides this; but as I know there are

countries also where it does not obtain, and as I have considered the

subject with some degree of exactness, I shall proceed in my humble

story, and leave you to judge of the expediency.

The proper species of rush for this purpose seems to be the juncus

effusus, or common soft rush, which is to be found in most moist

pastures, by the sides of streams, and under hedges. These rushes are

in best condition in the height of summer; but may be gathered, so as

to serve the purpose well, quite on to autumn. It would be needless to

add that the largest and longest are best. Decayed labourers, women,

and children, make it their business to procure and prepare them. As

soon as they are cut they must be flung into water, and kept there; for

otherwise they will dry and shrink, and the peel will not run. At first

a person would find it no easy matter to divest a rush of its peel or

rind, so as to leave one regular, narrow, even rib from top to bottom

that may support the pith: but this, like other feats, soon becomes

familiar even to children; and we have seen an old woman, stone-blind,

performing this business with great dispatch, and seldom failing to

strip them with the nicest regularity. When these junci are thus far

prepared, they must lie out on the grass to be bleached, and take the

dew for some nights, and afterwards be dried in the sun.

Some address is required in dipping these rushes in the scalding fat or

grease; but this knack also is to be attained by practice. The careful

wife of an industrious Hampshire labourer obtains all her fat for

nothing; for she saves the scummings of her bacon-pot for this use;

and, if the grease abounds with salt, she causes the salt to

precipitate to the bottom, by setting the scummings in a warm oven.

Where hogs are not much in use, and especially by the sea-side, the

coarser animal oils will come very cheap. A pound of common grease may

be procured for four pence; and about six pounds of grease will dip a

pound of rushes; and one pound of rushes may be bought for one

shilling: so that a pound of rushes, medicated and ready for use, will

cost three shillings. If men that keep bees will mix a little wax with

the grease, it will give it a consistency, and render it more cleanly,

and make the rushes burn longer: mutton-suet would have the same

effect.

A good rush, which measured in length two feet four inches and an half,

being minuted, burnt only three minutes short of an hour: and a rush

still of greater length has been known to burn one hour and a quarter.

These rushes give a good clear light. Watch-lights (coated with

tallow), it is true, shed a dismal one, ‘darkness visible’; but then

the wicks of those have two ribs of the rind, or peel, to support the

pith, while the wick of the dipped rush has but one. The two ribs are

intended to impede the progress of the flame, and make the candle last.

In a pound of dry rushes, avoirdupois, which I caused to be weighed and

numbered, we found upwards of one thousand six hundred individuals. Now

suppose each of these burns, one with another, only half an hour, then

a poor man will purchase eight hundred hours of light, a time exceeding

thirty-three entire days, for three shillings. According to this

account each rush, before dipping, costs 1/33 of a farthing, and 1/11

afterwards. Thus a poor family will enjoy 5&1/2 hours of comfortable

light for a farthing. An experienced old housekeeper assures me that

one pound and a half of rushes completely supplies his family the year

round, since working people burn no candle in the long days, because

they rise and go to bed by daylight.

Little farmers use rushes much in the short days, both morning and

evening in the dairy and kitchen; but the very poor, who are always the

worst economists, and therefore must continue very poor, buy an

halfpenny candle every evening, which, in their blowing open rooms,

does not burn much more than two hours. Thus have they only two hours’

light for their money instead of eleven.

While on the subject of rural oeconomy, it may not be improper to

mention a pretty implement of housewifery that we have seen no where

else; that is, little neat besoms which our foresters make from the

stalk of the polytricum commune, or great golden maiden-hair, which

they call silk-wood, and find plenty in the bogs. When this moss is

well combed and dressed, and divested of its outer skin, it becomes of

a beautiful bright chestnut colour; and, being soft and pliant, is very

proper for the dusting of beds, curtains, carpets, hangings, etc. If

these besoms were known to the brushmakers in town, it is probable they

might come much in use for the purpose above-mentioned.*

* A besom of this sort is to be seen in Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum.

I am, etc.

Letter XXVII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, December 12, 1775.

Dear Sir,

We had in this village more than twenty years ago an idiot-boy, whom I

well remember, who, from a child, showed a strong propensity to bees;

they were his food, his amusement, his sole object. And as people of

this cast have seldom more than one point in view, so this lad exerted

all his few faculties on this one pursuit. In the winter he dosed away

his time, within his father’s house, by the fireside, in a kind of

torpid state, seldom departing from the chimney-corner; but in the

summer he was all alert, and in quest of his game in the fields, and on

sunny banks. Honeybees, humble-bees, and wasps, were his prey wherever

he found them: he had no apprehensions from their stings, but would

seize them nudis manibus, and at once disarm them of their weapons, and

suck their bodies for the sake of their honey-bags. Sometimes he would

fill his bosom between his shirt and his skin with a number of these

captives; and sometimes would confine them in bottles. He was a very

merops apiaster, or bee-bird; and very injurious to men that kept bees;

for he would slide into their bee-gardens, and, sitting down before the

stools, would rap with his finger on the hives, and so take the bees as

they came out. He has been known to overturn hives for the sake of

honey, of which he was passionately fond. Where metheglin was making he

would linger round the tubs and vessels, begging a draught of what he

called bee-wine. As he ran about he used to make a humming noise with

his lips, resembling the buzzing of bees. This lad was lean and sallow,

and of a cadaverous complexion; and, except in his favourite pursuit,

in which he was wonderfully adroit, discovered no manner of

understanding. Had his capacity been better, and directed to the same

object, he had perhaps abated much of our wonder at the feats of a more

modern exhibitor of bees; and we may justly say of him now,

… Thou,

Had thy presiding star propitious shone,

Should’st Wildman be. …

When a tall youth he was removed from hence to a distant village, where

he died, as I understand, before he arrived at manhood.

I am, etc.

Letter XXVIII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Jan. 8, 1776.

Dear Sir,

It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off superstitious

prejudices: they are sucked in as it were with our mother’s milk; and

growing up with us at a time when they take the fastest hold and make

the most lasting impressions, become so interwoven into our very

constitutions, that the strongest good sense is required to disengage

ourselves from them. No wonder therefore that the lower people retain

them their whole lives through, since their minds are not invigorated

by a liberal education, and therefore not enabled to make any efforts

adequate to the occasion.

Such a preamble seems to be necessary before we enter on the

superstitions of this district, lest we should be suspected of

exaggeration in a recital of practices too gross for this enlightened

age.

But the people of Tring, in Hertfordshire, would do well to remember,

that no longer ago than the year 1751, and within twenty miles of the

capital, they seized on two superannuated wretches, crazed with age,

and overwhelmed with infirmities, on a suspicion of witchcraft; and, by

trying experiments, drowned them in a horse-pond.

In a farm-yard near the middle of this village stands, at this day, a

row of pollard-ashes, which, by the seams and long cicatrices down

their sides, manifestly show that, in former times, they have been

cleft asunder. These trees, when young and flexible, were severed and

held open by wedges, while ruptured children, stripped naked, were

pushed through the apertures, under a persuasion that, by such a

process, the poor babes would be cured of their infirmity. As soon as

the operation was over, the tree, in the suffering part, was plastered

with loam, and carefully swathed up. If the parts coalesced and

soldered together, as usually fell out, where the feat was performed

with any adroitness at all, the party was cured; but, where the cleft

continued to gape, the operation, it was supposed, would prove

ineffectual. Having occasion to enlarge my garden not long since, I cut

down two or three such trees, one of which did not grow together.

We have several persons now living in the village, who, in their

childhood, were supposed to be healed by this superstitious ceremony,

derived down perhaps from our Saxon ancestors, who practiced it before

their conversion to Christianity.

At the south corner of the Plestor, or area, near the church, there

stood, about twenty years ago, a very old grotesque hollow pollard-ash,

which for ages had been looked on with no small veneration as a

shrew-ash. Now a shrew-ash is an ash whose twigs or branches, when

gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the

pains which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew-mouse over the

part affected: for it is supposed that a shrew-mouse is of so baneful

and deleterious a nature, that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it

horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel

anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of the limb. Against

this accident, to which they were continually liable, our provident

fore-fathers always kept a shrew-ash at hand, which, when once

medicated, would maintain its virtue for ever. A shrew-ash was made

thus: * — Into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored with an

auger, and a poor devoted shrew-mouse was thrust in alive, and plugged

in, no doubt, with several quaint incantations long since forgotten. As

the ceremonies necessary for such a consecration are no longer

understood, all succession is at an end, and no such tree is known to

subsist in the manor, or hundred.

* For a similar practice, see Plot’s Staffordshire.

As to that on the Plestor,

The late vicar stubb’d and burnt it,

when he was way-warden, regardless of the remonstrances of the

by-standers, who interceded in vain for its preservation, urging its

power and efficacy, and alleging that it had been

Religione patrum multos servata per annos.

I am, etc.

Letter XXIX

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Feb. 7, 1776.

Dear Sir,

In heavy fogs, on elevated situations especially, trees are perfect

alembics: and no one that has not attended to such matters can imagine

how much water one tree will distil in a night’s time by condensing the

vapour, which trickles down the twigs and boughs, so as to make the

ground below quite in a float. In Newton-lane, in October 1775, on a

misty day, a particular oak in leaf dropped so fast that the cart-way

stood in puddles and the ruts ran with water, though the ground in

general was dusty.

In some of our smaller islands in the West-Indies, if I mistake not,

there are no springs or rivers; but the people are supplied with that

necessary element, water, merely by the dripping of some large tall

trees, which, standing in the bosom of a mountain, keep their heads

constantly enveloped with fogs and clouds, from which they dispense

their kindly never-ceasing moisture; and so render those districts

habitable by condensation alone.

Trees in leaf have such a vast proportion more of surface than those

that are naked, that, in theory, their condensations should greatly

exceed those that are stripped of their leaves; but, as the former

imbibe also a great quantity of moisture, it is difficult to say which

drip most: but this I know, that deciduous trees that are entwined with

much ivy seem to distil the greatest quantity. Ivy-leaves are smooth,

and thick, and cold, and therefore condense very fast; and besides

evergreens imbibe very little. These facts may furnish the intelligent

with hints concerning what trees they should plant round small ponds

that they would wish to be perennial; and show them how advantageous

some trees are in preference to others.

Trees perspire profusely, condense largely, and check evaporation so

much, that woods are always moist: no wonder therefore that they

contribute much to pools and streams.

That trees are great promoters of lakes and rivers appears from a

well-known fact in North America; for, since the woods and forests have

been grubbed and cleared, all bodies of water are much diminished; so

that some streams, that were very considerable a century ago, will not

now drive a common mill.* Besides, most woodlands, forests, and chases

with us abound with pools and morasses; no doubt for the reason given

above.

* Vide Kalm’s Travels to North America.

To a thinking mind few phenomena are more strange than the state of

little ponds on the summits of chalk-hills, many of which are never dry

in the most trying droughts of summer. On chalk-hills I say, because in

many rocky and gravelly soils springs usually break out pretty high on

the sides of elevated grounds and mountains; but no person acquainted

with chalky districts will allow that they ever saw springs in such a

soil but in valleys and bottoms, since the waters of so pervious a

stratum as chalk all lie on one dead level, as well-diggers have

assured me again and again.

Now we have many such little round ponds in this district; and one in

particular on our sheep-down, three hundred feet above my house; which

though never above three feet deep in the middle, and not more than

thirty feet in diameter, and containing perhaps not more than two or

three hundred hogsheads of water, yet never is known to fail, though it

affords drink for three hundred or four hundred sheep, and for at least

twenty head of large cattle beside. This pond, it is true, is over-hung

with two moderate beeches, that, doubtless, at times afford it much

supply: but then we have others as small, that, without the aid of

trees, and in spite of evaporation from sun and wind, and perpetual

consumption by cattle, yet constantly maintain a moderate share of

water, without overflowing in the wettest seasons, as they would do if

supplied by springs. By my journal of May 1775, it appears that ‘the

small and even considerable ponds in the vales are now dried up, while

the small ponds on the very tops of hills are but little affected.’ Can

this difference be accounted for from evaporation alone, which

certainly is more prevalent in bottoms ? or rather have not those

elevated pools some unnoticed recruits, which in the night time

counterbalance the waste of the day; without which the cattle alone

must soon exhaust them ? And here it will be necessary to enter more

minutely into the cause. Dr. Hales, in his Vegetable Statics, advances,

from experiment, that ‘the moister the earth is the more dew falls on

it in a night: and more than a double quantity of dew falls on a

surface of water than there does on an equal surface of moist earth.’

Hence we see that water, by its coolness, is enabled to assimilate to

itself a large quantity of moisture nightly by condensation; and that

the air, when loaded with fogs and vapours, and even with copious dews,

can alone advance a considerable and never-failing resource. Persons

that are much abroad, and travel early and late, such as shepherds,

fishermen, etc., can tell what prodigious fogs prevail in the night on

elevated downs, even in the hottest parts of summer; and how much the

surfaces of things are drenched by those swimming vapours, though, to

the senses, all the while, little moisture seems to fall.

I am, etc.

Letter XXX

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, April 3, 1776.

Dear Sir,

Monsieur Herissant, a French anatomist, seems persuaded that he has

discovered the reason why cuckoos do not hatch their own eggs; the

impediment, he supposes, arises from the internal structure of their

parts, which incapacitates them for incubation. According to this

gentleman, the crop or craw of a cuckoo does not lie before the sternum

at the bottom of the neck, as in the gallinae columbae, etc., but

immediately behind it, on and over the bowels, so as to make a large

protuberance in the belly.*

* Histoire de l’Academie Royale, 1752.

Induced by this assertion, we procured a cuckoo; and, cutting open the

breast-bone, and exposing the intestines to sight, found the crop lying

as mentioned above. This stomach was large and round, and stuffed hard

like a pin-cushion with food, which, upon nice examination, we found to

consist of various insects; such as small scarabs, spiders, and

dragon-flies; the last of which we have seen cuckoos catching on the

wing as they were just emerging out of the aurelia state. Among this

farrago also were to be seen maggots, and many seeds, which belonged

either to gooseberries, currants, cranberries, or some such fruit; so

that these birds apparently subsist on insects and fruits: nor was

there the least appearance of bones, feathers, or fur to support the

idle notion of their being birds of prey.

The sternum in this bird seemed to us to be remarkably short, between

which and the anus lay the crop, or craw, and immediately behind that

the bowels against the backbone.

It must be allowed, as this anatomist observes, that the crop placed

just upon the bowels must, especially when full, be in a very uneasy

situation during the business of incubation; yet the test will be to

examine whether birds that are actually known to sit for certain are

not formed in a similar manner. This inquiry I proposed to myself to

make with a fern-owl, or goat-sucker, as soon as opportunity offered:

because, if their information proves the same, the reason for

incapacity in the cuckoo will be allowed to have been taken up somewhat

hastily.

Not long after a fern-owl was procured, which, from its habit and

shape, we suspected might resemble the cuckoo in its internal

construction. Nor were our suspicions ill-grounded; for, upon the

dissection, the crop, or craw, also lay behind the sternum, immediately

on the viscera, between them and the skin of the belly. It was bulky,

and stuffed hard with large phalaenae, moths of several sorts, and

their eggs, which no doubt had been forced out of those insects by the

action of swallowing.

Now as it appears that this bird, which is so well known to practice

incubation, is formed in a similar manner with cuckoos, Monsieur

Herissant’s conjecture, that cuckoos are incapable of incubation from

the disposition of their intestines, seems to fall to the ground: and

we are still at a loss for the cause of that strange and singular

peculiarity in the instance of the cuculus canorus.

We found the case to be the same with the ring-tail hawk, in respect to

formation; and, as far as I can recollect, with the swift; and probably

it is so with many more sorts of birds that are not granivorous.

I am, etc.

Letter XXXI

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, April 29, 1776.

Dear Sir,

On August the 4th, 1775, we surprised a large viper, which seemed very

heavy and bloated, as it lay in the grass basking in the sun. When we

came to cut it up, we found that the abdomen was crowded with young,

fifteen in number; the shortest of which measured full seven inches,

and were about the size of full-grown earthworms. This little fry

issued into the world with the true viper-spirit about them, showing

great alertness as soon as disengaged from the belly of the dam: they

twisted and wriggled about, and set themselves up, and gaped very wide

when touched with a stick, showing manifest tokens of menace and

defiance, though as yet they had no manner of fangs that we could find,

even with the help of our glasses.

To a thinking mind nothing is more wonderful than that early instinct

which impresses young animals with the notion of the situation of their

natural weapons, and of using them properly in their own defence, even

before those weapons subsist or are formed. Thus a young cock will spar

at his adversary before his spurs are grown; and a calf or a lamb will

push with their heads before their horns are sprouted. In the same

manner did these young adders attempt to bite before their fangs were

in being. The dam however was furnished with very formidable ones,

which we lifted up (for they fold down when not used) and cut them off

with the point of our scissors.

There was little room to suppose that this brood had ever been in the

open air before; and that they were taken in for refuge, at the mouth

of the dam, when she perceived that danger was approaching; because

then probably we should have found them somewhere in the neck, and not

in the abdomen.

Letter XXXII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Castration has a strange effect: it emasculates both man, beast, and

bird, and brings them to a near resemblance of the other sex. Thus

eunuchs have smooth unmuscular arms, thighs, and legs; and broad hips,

and beardless chins, and squeaking voices. Gelt-stags and bucks have

hornless heads, like hinds and does. Thus wethers have small horns,

like ewes; and oxen large bent horns, and hoarse voices when they low,

like cows: for bulls have short straight horns; and though they mutter

and grumble in a deep tremendous tone, yet they low in a shrill high

key. Capons have small combs and gills, and look pallid about the head,

like pullets; they also walk without any parade, and hover chickens

like hens. Barrow-hogs have also small tusks like sows.

Thus far it is plain that the deprivation of masculine vigour puts a

stop to the growth of those parts or appendages that are looked upon as

its insignia. But the ingenious Mr. Lisle, in his book on husbandry,

carries it much farther; for he says that the loss of those insignia

alone has sometimes a strange effect on the ability itself: he had a

boar so fierce and venereous, that, to prevent mischief, orders were

given for his tusks to be broken off. No sooner had the beast suffered

this injury then his powers forsook him, and he neglected those females

to whom before he was passionately attached, and from whom no fences

could restrain him.

Letter XXXIII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

The natural term of an hog’s life is little known, and the reason is

plain — because it is neither profitable nor convenient to keep that

turbulent animal to the full extent of its time: however, my neighbour,

a man of substance, who had no occasion to study every little advantage

to a nicety, kept an half-bred Bantam sow, who was as thick as she was

long, and whose belly swept on the ground, till she was advanced to her

seventeenth year; at which period she showed some tokens of age by the

decay of her teeth and the decline of her fertility.

For about ten years this prolific mother produced two litters in the

year of about ten at a time, and once above twenty at a litter; but, as

there were near double the number of pigs to that of teats, many died.

From long experience in the world this female was grown very sagacious

and artful:-when she found occasion to converse with a boar she used to

open all the intervening gates, and march, by herself, up to a distant

farm where one was kept; and when her purpose was served would return

by the same means. At the age of about fifteen her litters began to be

reduced to four or five; and such a litter she exhibited when in her

fatting-pen. She proved, when fat, good bacon, juicy, and tender; the

rind, or sward, was remarkably thin. At a moderate computation she was

allowed to have been the fruitful parent of three hundred pigs: a

prodigious instance of fecundity in so large a quadruped! She was

killed in spring 1775.

I am, etc.

Letter XXXIV

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, May 9, 1776.

Dear Sir,

… admorunt ubera tigres.

We have remarked in a former letter how much incongruous animals, in a

lonely state, may be attached to each other from a spirit of sociality;

in this it may not be amiss to recount a different motive which has

been known to create as strange a fondness.

My friend had a little helpless leveret brought to him, which the

servants fed with milk in a spoon, and about the same time his cat

kittened and the young were dispatched and buried. The hare was soon

lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most foundlings, to be killed

by some dog or cat. However, in about a fortnight, as the master was

sitting in his garden in the dusk of the evening, he observed his cat,

with tail erect, trotting towards him, and calling with little short

inward notes of complacency, such as they use towards their kittens,

and something gamboling after, which proved to be the leveret that the

cat had supported with her milk, and continued to support with great

affection.

Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous and

predaceous one!

Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the ferocious genus of

Feles, the murium leo, as Linnaeus calls it, should be affected with

any tenderness towards an animal which is its natural prey, is not so

easy to determine.

This strange affection probably was occasioned by that desiderium,

those tender maternal feelings, which the loss of her kittens had

awakened in her breast; and by the complacency and ease she derived to

herself from the procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too much

distended with milk, till, from habit, she became as much delighted

with this foundling as if it had been her real offspring.

This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance which

grave historians as well as the poets assert, of exposed children being

sometimes nurtured by female wild beasts that probably had lost their

young. For it is not one whit more marvellous that Romulus and Remus,

in their infant state, should be nursed by a she-wolf, than that a poor

little sucking leveret should be fostered and cherished by a bloody

grimalkin.

… viridi fœtam Mavortis in antro

Procubuisse lupam: geminos huic ubera circum

Ludere pendentes pueros, et lambere matrem

Impavidos: illam tereti cervice reflexam

Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingere lingua.

Letter XXXV

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, May 20, 1777.

Dear Sir,

Lands that are subject to frequent inundations are always poor; and

probably the reason may be because the worms are drowned. The most

insignificant insects and reptiles are of much more consequence, and

have much more influence in the Economy nature, than the incurious are

aware of; and are mighty in their effect, from their minuteness, which

renders them less an object of attention; and from their numbers and

fecundity. Earth-worms, though in appearance a small and despicable

link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable

chasm. For, to say nothing of half the birds, and some quadrupeds,

which are almost entirely supported by them, worms seem to be the great

promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them,

by boring, perforating, and loosening the soil, and rendering it

pervious to rains and the fibres of plants, by drawing straws and

stalks of leaves and twigs into it; and, most of all, by throwing up

such infinite numbers of lumps of earth called worm-casts, which, being

their excrement, is a fine manure for grain and grass. Worms probably

provide new soil for hills and slopes where the rain washes the earth

away; and they affect slopes, probably to avoid being flooded.

Gardeners and farmers express their detestation of worms; the former

because they render their walks unsightly, and make them much work: and

the latter because, as they think, worms eat their green corn. But

these men would find that the earth without worms would soon become

cold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation; and consequently sterile:

and besides, in favour of worms, it should be hinted that green corn,

plants, and flowers, are not so much injured by them as by many species

of coleoptera (scarabs), and tipulae (long-legs), in their larva, or

grub-state; and by unnoticed myriads of small shell-less snails, called

slugs, which silently and imperceptibly make amazing havoc in the field

and garden.*

* Farmer Young, of Norton-farm, says that this spring (1777) about four

acres of his wheat in one field was entirely destroyed by slugs, which

swarmed on the blades of corn, and devoured it as fast as it sprang.

These hints we think proper to throw out in order to set the

inquisitive and discerning to work.

A good monography of worms would afford much entertainment and

information at the same time, and would open a large and new field in

natural history. Worms work most in the spring; but by no means lie

torpid in the dead months; are out every mild night in the winter, as

any person may be convinced that will take the pains to examine his

grass-plots with a candle; are hermaphrodites, and much addicted to

venery, and consequently very prolific.

I am, etc.

Letter XXXVI

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Nov. 22, 1777.

Dear Sir,

You cannot but remember that the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of

last March were very hot days; so sultry that everybody complained and

were restless under those sensations to which they had not been

reconciled by gradual approaches.

This sudden summer-like heat was attended by many summer coincidences;

for on those two days the thermometer rose to sixty-six in the shade;

many species of insects revived and came forth; some bees swarmed in

this neighbourhood; the old tortoise, near Lewes in Sussex, awakened

and came forth out of its dormitory; and, what is most to my present

purpose, many house-swallows appeared and were very alert in many

places, and particularly at Cobham, in Surrey.

But as that short warm period was succeeded as well as preceded by

harsh severe weather, with frequent frosts and ice, and cutting winds,

the insects withdrew, the tortoise retired again into the ground, and

the swallows were seen no more until the tenth of April, when, the

rigour of the spring abating, a softer season began to prevail.

Again; it appears by my journals for many years past, that

house-martins retire, to a bird, about the beginning of October; so

that a person not very observant of such matters would conclude that

they had taken their last farewell: but then it may be seen in my

diaries also that considerable flocks have discovered themselves again

in the first week of November, and often on the fourth day of that

month only for one day; and that not as if they were in actual

migration, but playing about at their leisure and feeding calmly, as if

no enterprise of moment at all agitated their spirits. And this was the

case in the beginning of this very month; for, on the fourth of

November, more than twenty house-martins, which, in appearance, had all

departed about the seventh of October, were seen again, for that one

morning only, sporting between my fields and the Hanger, and feasting

on insects which swarmed in that sheltered district. The preceding day

was wet and blustering, but the fourth was dark and mild, and soft, the

wind at south-west, and the thermometer at 58 1/2 ; a pitch not common

at that season of the year. Moreover, it may not be amiss to add in

this place, that whenever the thermometer is above 50 the bat comes

flitting out in every autumnal and winter month.

From all these circumstances laid together, it is obvious that torpid

insects, reptiles, and quadrupeds, are awakened from their profoundest

slumbers by a little untimely warmth; and therefore that nothing so

much promotes this death-like stupor as a defect of heat. And farther,

it is reasonable to suppose that two whole species, or at least many

individuals of those two species, of British hirundines, do never leave

this island at all, but partake of the same benumbed state: for we

cannot suppose that, after a month’s absence, house-martins can return

from southern regions to appear for one morning in November, or that

house-swallows should leave the districts of Africa to enjoy, in March,

the transient summer of a couple of days.

I am, etc.

Letter XXXVII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, Jan. 8, 1778.

Dear Sir,

There was in this village several years ago a miserable pauper, who,

from his birth, was addicted with a leprosy, as far as we are aware of

a singular kind, since it affected only the palms of his hands and the

soles of his feet. This scaly eruption usually broke out twice in the

year, at the spring and fall; and, by peeling away, left the skin so

thin and tender that neither his hands or feet were able to perform

their functions; so that the poor object was half his time on crutches,

incapable of employ, and languishing in a tiresome state of indolence

and inactivity. His habit was lean, lank, and cadaverous. In this sad

plight he dragged on a miserable existence, a burden to himself and his

parish, which was obliged to support him till he was relieved by death

at more than thirty years of age.

The good women, who love to account for every defect in children by the

doctrine of longing, said that his mother felt a violent propensity for

oysters, which she was unable to gratify; and that the black rough

scurf on his hands and feet were the shells of that fish. We knew his

parents, neither of which were lepers; his father in particular lived

to be far advanced in years.

In all ages the leprosy has made dreadful havoc among mankind. The

Israelites seem to have been greatly afflicted with it from the most

remote times; as appears from the peculiar and repeated injunctions

given them in the Levitical law.* Nor was the rancour of this foul

disorder much abated in the last period of their commonwealth, as may

be seen in many passages of the New Testament.

* See Leviticus, chap. xiii. and xiv.

Some centuries ago this horrible distemper prevailed all Europe over;

and our forefathers were by no means exempt, as appears by the large

provision made for objects labouring under this calamity. There was an

hospital for female lepers in the diocese of Lincoln, a noble one near

Durham, three in London and Southwark, and perhaps many more in or near

our great towns and cities. Moreover, some crowned heads, and other

wealthy and charitable personages, bequeathed large legacies to such

poor people as languished under this hopeless infirmity.

It must therefore, in these days, be, to an humane and thinking person,

a matter of equal wonder and satisfaction, when he contemplates how

nearly this pest is eradicated, and observes that a leper now is a rare

sight. He will, moreover, when engaged in such a train of thought,

naturally inquire for the reason. This happy change perhaps may have

originated and been continued from the much smaller quantity of salted

meat and fish now eaten in these kingdoms; from the use of linen next

the skin; from the plenty of better bread; and from the profusion of

fruits, roots, legumes, and greens, so common in every family. Three or

four centuries ago, before there were any enclosures, sown-grasses,

field-turnips, or field-carrots, or hay, all the cattle which had grown

fat in summer, and were not killed for winter-use, were turned out soon

after Michaelmas to shift as they could through the dead months; so

that no fresh meat could be had in winter or spring. Hence the

marvellous account of the vast stores of salted flesh found in the

larder of the eldest Spencer** t in the days of Edward the Second, even

so late in the spring as the third of May. It was from magazines like

these that the turbulent barons supported in idleness their riotous

swarms of retainers ready for any disorder or mischief. But agriculture

is now arrived at such a pitch of perfection, that our best and fattest

meats are killed in the winter; and no man need eat salted flesh,

unless he prefers it, that has money to buy fresh.

** Viz. Six hundred bacons, eighty carcasses of beef, and six hundred

muttons.

One cause of this distemper might be, no doubt, the quantity of

wretched fresh and salt fish consumed by the commonalty at all seasons

as well as in Lent; which our poor now would hardly be persuaded to

touch.

The use of linen changes, shirts or shifts, in the room of sordid and

filthy woollen, long worn next the skin, is a matter of neatness

comparatively modern; but must prove a great means of preventing

cutaneous ails. At this very time woollen instead of linen prevails

among the poorer Welch, who are subject to foul eruptions.

The plenty of good wheaten bread that now is found among all ranks of

people in the south, instead of that miserable sort which used in old

days to be made of barley or beans, may contribute not a little to the

sweetening their blood and correcting their juices; for the inhabitants

of mountainous districts, to this day, are still liable to the itch and

other cutaneous disorders, from a wretchedness and poverty of diet.

As to the produce of a garden, every middle-aged person of observation

may perceive, within his own memory, both in town and country, how

vastly the consumption of vegetables is increased. Green-stalls in

cities now support multitudes in a comfortable state, while gardeners

get fortunes. Every decent labourer also has his garden, which is half

his support, as well as his delight; and common farmers provide plenty

of beans, peas, and greens, for their hinds to eat with their bacon;

and those few that do not are despised for their sordid parsimony, and

looked upon as regardless of the welfare of their dependents. Potatoes

have prevailed in this little district, by means of premiums, within

these twenty years only; and are much esteemed here now by the poor,

who would scarce have ventured to taste them in the last reign.

Our Saxon ancestors certainly had some sort of cabbage, because they

call the month of February sprout-cale; but, long after their days, the

cultivation of gardens was little attended to. The religious, being men

of leisure, and keeping up a constant correspondence with Italy, were

the first people among us that had gardens and fruit-trees in any

perfection, within the walls of their abbies* and priories. The barons

neglected every pursuit that did not lead to war or tend to the

pleasure of the chase.

* ‘In monasteries the lamp of knowledge continued to burn, however

dimly. In them men of business were formed for the state: the art of

writing was cultivated by the monks; they were the only proficients in

mechanics, gardening, and architecture.’ — See Dalrymple’s Annals of

Scotland.

It was not till gentlemen took up the study of horticulture themselves

that the knowledge of gardening made such hasty advances. Lord Cobham,

Lord Ila, and Mr. Waller of Beaconsfield, were some of the first people

of rank that promoted the elegant science of ornamenting without

despising the superintendence of the kitchen quarters and fruit walls.

A remark made by the excellent Mr. Ray in his Tour of Europe at once

surprises us, and corroborates what has been advanced above; for we

find him observing, so late as his days, that ‘the Italians use several

herbs for sallets, which are not yet or have not been but lately used

in England, viz., selleri (celery), which is nothing else but the sweet

smallage; the young shoots whereof, with a little of the head of the

root cut off, they eat raw with oil and pepper.’ And further he adds

‘curled endive blanched is much used beyond seas; and, for a raw

sallet, seemed to excel lettuce itself.’ Now this journey was

undertaken no longer ago than in the year 1663.

I am, etc.

Letter XXXVIII

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Fortè puer, comitum seductus ab agmine fido,

Dixerat, ecquis adest ? et, adest, responderat echo.

Hic stupet; utque aciem partes divisit in omnes;

Voce, veni, clamat magna. Vocat illa vocantem.

Selborne, Feb. 12, 1778.

Dear Sir,

In a district so diversified as this, so full of hollow vales, and

hanging woods, it is no wonder that echoes should abound. Many we have

discovered that return the cry of a pack of dogs, the notes of a

hunting-horn, a tunable ring of bells, or the melody of birds, very

agreeably: but we were still at a loss for a polysyllabical, articulate

echo, till a young gentleman, who had parted from his company in a

summer evening walk, and was calling after them, stumbled upon a very

curious one in a spot where it might least be expected. At first he was

much surprised, and could not be persuaded but that he was mocked by

some boy; but, repeating his trials in several languages, and finding

his respondent to be a very adroit polyglot, he then discerned the

deception.

This echo in an evening, before rural noises cease, would repeat ten

syllables most articulately and distinctly, especially if quick dactyls

were chosen. The last syllables of

Tityre, tu patulæ recubans …

were as audibly and intelligibly returned as the first: and there is no

doubt, could trial have been made, but that at midnight, when the air

is very elastic, and a dead stillness prevails, one or two syllables

more might have been obtained; but the distance rendered so late an

experiment very inconvenient.

Quick dactyls, we observed, succeeded best; for when we came to try its

powers in slow, heavy, embarrassed spondees of the same number of

syllables,

Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens …

we could perceive a return but of four or five.

All echoes have some one place to which they are returned stronger and

more distinct than to any other; and that is always the place that lies

at right angles with the object of repercussion, and is not too near,

nor too far off. Buildings, or naked rocks, re-echo much more

articulately than hanging wood or vales; because in the latter the

voice is as it were entangled, and embarrassed in the covert, and

weakened in the rebound.

The true object of this echo, as we found by various experiments, is

the stone-built, tiled hop-kiln in Galleylane, which measures in front

40 feet, and from the ground to the eaves 12 feet. The true centrum

phonicum, or just distance, is one particular spot in the King’s-field,

in the path to Nore-hill, on the very brink of the steep balk above the

hollow cart way. In this case there is no choice of distance; but the

path, by mere contingency, happens to be the lucky, the identical spot,

because the ground rises or falls so immediately, if the speaker either

retires or advances, that his mouth would at once be above or below the

object.

We measured this polysyllabical echo with great exactness, and found

the distance to fall very short of Dr. Plot’s rule for distinct

articulation: for the Doctor, in his history of Oxfordshire, allows 120

feet for the return of each syllable distinctly: hence this echo, which

gives ten distinct syllables, ought to measure 400 yards, or 120 feet

to each syllable; whereas our distance is only 258 yards, or near 75

feet, to each syllable. Thus our measure falls short of the Doctor’s,

as five to eight: but then it must be acknowledged that this candid

philosopher was convinced afterwards, that some latitude must be

admitted of in the distance of echoes according to time and place.

When experiments of this sort are making, it should always be

remembered that weather and the time of day have a vast influence on an

echo; for a dull, heavy, moist air deadens and clogs the sound; and hot

sunshine renders the air thin and weak, and deprives it of all its

springiness; and a ruffling wind quite defeats the whole. In a still,

clear, dewy evening the air is most elastic; and perhaps the later the

hour the more so.

Echo has always been so amusing to the imagination, that the poets have

personified her; and in their hands she has been the occasion of many a

beautiful fiction. Nor need the gravest man be ashamed to appear taken

with such a phenomenon, since it may become the subject of

philosophical or mathematical inquiries.

One should have imagined that echoes, if not entertaining, must at

least have been harmless and inoffensive; yet Virgil advances a strange

notion, that they are injurious to bees. After enumerating some

probable and reasonable annoyances, such as prudent owners would wish

far removed from their bee-gardens, he adds

… aut ubi concava pulsu

Saxa sonant, vocisque offensa resultat image.

This wild and fanciful assertion will hardly be admitted by the

philosophers of these days; especially as they all now seem agreed that

insects are not furnished with any organs of hearing at all. But if it

should be urged, that though they cannot hear yet perhaps they may feel

the repercussion of sounds, I grant it is possible they may. Yet that

these impressions are distasteful or hurtful, I deny, because bees, in

good summers, thrive well in my outlet, where the echoes are very

strong: for this village is another Anathoth, a place of responses or

echoes. Besides, it does not appear from experiment that bees are in

any way capable of being affected by sounds: for I have often tried my

own with a large speaking-trumpet held close to their hives, and with

such an exertion of voice as would have hailed a ship at the distance

of a mile, and still these insects pursued their various employments

undisturbed, and without showing the least sensibility or resentment.

Some time since its discovery this echo is become totally silent,

though the object, or hop-kiln remains: nor is there any mystery in

this defect, for the field between is planted as an hop-garden, and the

voice of the speaker is totally absorbed and lost among the poles and

entangled foliage of the hops. And when the poles are removed in autumn

the disappointment is the same; because a tall quick-set hedge,

nurtured up for the purpose of shelter to the hop ground, entirely

interrupts the impulse and repercussion of the voice: so that till

those obstructions are removed no more of its garrulity can be

expected.

Should any gentleman of fortune think an echo in his park or outlet a

pleasing incident, he might build one at little or no expense. For

whenever he had occasion for a new barn, stable, dog-kennel, or the

like structure, it would be only needful to erect this building on the

gentle declivity of an hill, with a like rising opposite to it, at a

few hundred yards distance; and perhaps success might be the easier

ensured could some canal, lake, or stream, intervene. From a seat at

the centrum phonicum he and his friends might amuse themselves

sometimes of an evening with the prattle of this loquacious nymph; of

whose complacency and decent reserve more may be said than can with

truth of every individual of her sex; since she is

… quæ nec reticere loquenti,

Nec prior ipsa loqui didicit resonabilis echo.

I am, etc.

P.S. — The classic reader will, I trust, pardon the following lovely

quotation, so finely describing echoes, and so poetically accounting

for their causes from popular superstition:

Quæ bene quom videas, rationem reddere possis

Tute tibi atque alus, quo pacto per loca sola

Saxa pareis formas verborum ex ordine reddant,

Palanteis comites quom monteis inter opacos

Quaerimus, et magna dispersos voce ciemus.

Sex etiam, aut septem loca vidi reddere voces

Unam quom jaceres: ita colles collibus ipsis

Verba repulsantes iterabant dicta referre.

Haec loca capripedes Satyros, Nymphasque tenere

Finitimi fingunt, et Faunos esse loquuntur;

Quorum noctivago strepitu, ludoque jocanti

Adfirmant volgo taciturna silentia rumpi,

Chordarumque sonos fieri, dulceisque querelas,

Tibia quas fundit digitis pulsata canentum:

Et genus agricolum late sentiscere, quom Pan

Pinea semiferi capitis velamina quassans,

Unco saepe labro calamos percurrit hianteis,

Fistula silvestrem ne cesset fundere musam.

Lucretius, lib. iv. 1. 576.

Letter XXXIX

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, May 13, 1778.

Dear Sir,

Among the many singularities attending those amusing birds the swifts,

I am now confirmed in the opinion that we have every year the same

number of pairs invariably; at least the result of my inquiry has been

exactly the same for a long time past. The swallows and martins are so

numerous, and so widely distributed over the village, that it is hardly

possible to recount them; while the swifts, though they do not all

build in the church, yet so frequently haunt it, and play and

rendezvous round it, that they are easily enumerated. The number that I

constantly find are eight pairs; about half of which reside in the

church, and the rest build in some of the lowest and meanest thatched

cottages. Now as these eight pairs, allowance being made for accidents,

breed yearly eight pairs more, what becomes annually of this increase;

and what determines every spring which pairs shall visit us, and

reoccupy their ancient haunts ?

Ever since I have attended to the subject of ornithology, I have always

supposed that that sudden reverse of affection, that strange

ἀντιστοργὴ, which immediately succeeds in the feathered kind to the

most passionate fondness, is the occasion of an equal dispersion of

birds over the face of the earth. Without this provision one favourite

district would be crowded with inhabitants, while others would be

destitute and forsaken. But the parent birds seem to maintain a jealous

superiority, and to oblige the young to seek for new abodes: and the

rivalry of the males, in many kinds, prevents their crowding the one on

the other. Whether the swallows and house-martins return in the same

exact number annually is not easy to say, for reasons given above: but

it is apparent, as I have remarked before in my Monographies, that the

numbers returning bear no manner of proportion to the numbers retiring.