dowager Lady Pembroke; Henry Bilson Legge and lady; and now Lord Stawel, their son.

1

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.

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 com

mon,

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 are never seen within the

This prince was the inventor of mezzotinto.+

The invention of mezzotinto is generally attributed to Prince Rupert; but it is also by some assigned to Lieutenant-Colonel Seigend, an officer in the service of the Landgrave of Hesse, so early as the year 1613, from whom the prince derived the secret.-W. J.

limits of Wolmer; nor were the red deer of Wol mer 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 imprisonments can deter them; so impossible is it to extinguish the spirit of sporting, which seems to be inherent in human nature.

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

X.

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 rustica) 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 disappoint

6

ment 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 11th, and young martins (hirundines urbica) were then fledged in their nests. Both species will breed again once; for I see by my fauna of last year, that young broods came forth so late as September the 18th. 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 29th; and yet they totally disappeared with us by the 5th of October.

How strange it is, that the swift, which seems to live exactly the same life with the swallow and house-martin, should leave us before the middle of August invariably! while the latter stay often till the middle of October; and once I saw numbers of house-martins on the 7th of November. The martins and red-wing fieldfares were flying in sight together; an uncommon assemblage of summer and winter birds!

A little yellow bird (it is either a species of the alauda trivialis, or rather, perhaps, of the motaeilla 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 flycatcher. There is one circumstance characteristic of this bird, which seems to have escaped observation; and that is, it takes its stand on the top of some stake or post, from whence it springs forth on its prey, catching a fly in the air, and hardly ever touching the ground, but returning still to the same stand for many times together

I perceive there are more than one species of the motacilla trochilus; Mr Derham supposes, in Ray's Philosophical 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 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 Linnæus 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, (See Syst. Nat.) which he says "natat in fossis et urinatur." I should be glad to procure one "plantis palmatis." Linnæus 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