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availed themselves greatly by spinning wool, for making of barragons, a genteel corded stuff, much in vogue

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Total of baptisms from 1780 to 1829, both inclusive, fifty years, 1193.

Average of Burials for Fifty Years.

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Total of burials from 1780 to 1829, both inclusive, fifty years, 618.

Without touching upon the many deductions that might be attempted to be drawn from these data on the state of the population in an agricultural and almost isolated parish, extending over upwards of a hundred years, there is one observation which obtrudes itself on the attention. In 110 years, at Selborne, the baptisms have exceeded the burials in the proportion of 7 to 4, and the absolute excess has been 959. If, therefore, the population were rightly assumed in the time of the elder Gilbert White, the parish ought now to contain upwards of 1400 inhabitants. This, however, is not the case. In 1831 the number of its inhabitants was 924. There must consequently have been considerable emigration from it.

The population is thus stated in the returns printed by order of the House of Commons:

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The abstract of the answers and returns made at the census in the latter year states the area of the parish at 4410 acres: the number of houses, inhabited, 128; uninhabited, 4: the number of families, 163; of which were chiefly employed in Agriculture, 91; in Trade, 36; others, 36: the number of Males, 468; Females, 456; of Males, 20 years of age, 193: Occupiers of land, employing labourers, 22; not employing labourers, 8: Labourers employed in Agriculture, 82; in Manufacture, 0; in Trade or Handicraft, 44; others, 19; Capitalists or Professional, 2; other Males, 20 years of age, 16: Male Servants, 0; Female, 14.— E. T. B.]

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.

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LETTER VI.

TO THE SAME.

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

See his History of Staffordshire.

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 tree3.

"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 Hamastatics, p. 360.—Quere, 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?

[Some additional instances evidencing the ascent of warmth from beneath the surface, are given by the author in his letter to Daines Barrington, numbered LXI; in which he describes the effects of the short but intense frost of 1768.-E. T. B.]

3 A more recent instance of the occurrence of a log of the bog-oak is recorded by Gilbert White in Letter LIX. to Daines Barrington: and the stock is yet by no means exhausted, although fifty years have elapsed since the time at which he wrote. The sides of the peat-moor to the north-east of Wolmer pond show many heaps of chumps and stumps of trees dug by the labourers, in the prosecution of their cuttings, from the bog and the turf above it. Oak, and fir, and birch are certainly included among them. They are in various stages of carbonization, dependent on their position, or, in other words, on the length of time during which they have been subjected to the action of moisture and pressure. Those which occur among the peat are converted throughout their entire substance into a charcoal, which is generally rather brown than black: of this kind all the pieces that I observed were of small diameter, not exceeding

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 summers 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, or black game. 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 gray hen was sprung by some beagles in beating for a hare. The

three or four inches. On some of them the character of the oak bark was well preserved. Above the peat is a layer of sand of eighteen inches or two feet in thickness. On the top of this rests a thick layer of turf; consisting of the blended roots of many generations of heath and other plants, and approaching, in its lower part, to the character of the genuine bog. It is from this compact layer that the greater number of the larger blocks are obtained. Most of them exhibit but little of the charred appearance; their character is rather that of washed and bleached timber. They are of comparatively recent date; and, although no trees, nor even shrubs, are now growing by this peat-moor, stumps are occasionally stumbled against, among the heath, which belong, most probably, to the same era with the bleached and larger trunks. To the trunks the commencement of the roots remain, in most instances, attached; and the almost horizontal mode in which the main roots spread away from the base of the stem, is quite in accordance with their having grown in a soil difficult to be penetrated, and retaining moisture near the surface alone. Among this bleached kind of upper bog timber there were, towards the end of 1835, many stumps of oak of six and seven feet in length and of thirty to forty inches in circumference; portions of fir of thirty inches in circumference; and the lower part of one well-grown stem of a young fir, fifteen feet in length and about five inches in diameter.-E. T. B.

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