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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 gooa 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, ESQ.

AMONG the singularities of this place, the two rocky hollow lanes, the cue 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 watercourses 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 frostwork. 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, were it strictly looked after, with all its kindly aspects, and all its sloping coverts, would swarm

with game; even now, hares, partridges, and pheasants abound; and in old days woodcocks were as plentiful. There are few quails, because they more affect open fields than enclosures. After harvest, some few land-rails 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,

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The village of Selborne, and large hamlet of Oakhanger, 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 feil and bark timber." In the spring and summer

• A very intelligent gentleman assures me, (and he speaks from upwards of forty years' experience,) that the mean rain of any place cannot be ascertained to a person has measured it for a very long period.

If I had only measured the rain," says he, “for the four for years, from 1740 to 174), I abould have said the mean rain at Lyndon was 16% inches for the year; if from 1740 to 1250, 18% inches The mean zain before 1783, wa 20x; from 1789 and one, 25%; from 1770 to 17. Ffy 173, 1774, and 1775, had been measured, Lyndon mean zein won't have been called 32 inches, increasing from 16.6 to 32"

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. The inhabitants enjoy a good share of health and longevity, and the parish swarms with children

LETTER VI.

TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ.

SHOULD I omit to describe with some exactness the Forest of Wolmer, of which three-fifths perhaps lie in this parish, my account of Selborne would be very imperfect, as it is a district abounding with many curious productions, both animal and 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

* See his History 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

oak, I have also been shewn 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.*

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, wildducks, 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, 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 sportsman cried out, "A hen pheasant!" but a gentleman present, who had often seen black game in the north of England, assured me that it was a gray-hen.+

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. November 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?

* Fossils of this kind, including oaks and pines, are common in most marshes and bogs of Europe. .Ed.

+ It is very doubtful whether the black grouse ever was plentiful in the less mountainous counties of England. At present they are very

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 far 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 farther adds, that, by means of the Waltham Blacks, or, to use his own expression, as soon as they began blacking, they were reduced to about fifty head, and so continued decreasing, till the time of the late Duke of Cumberland. It is now more than thirty years ago, that his Highness sent down an huntsman, and six yeomen prickers, in scarlet jackets laced with gold, attended by the stag-hounds; ordering them to take every deer in this forest alive, and to convey them in carts to Windsor. In the course of the summer, they caught every stag, some of which shewed extraordinary diversion; but in the following winter, when the hinds were also carried off, such fine chases were

scarce in the southern counties; a few are to be met with in the New Forest, Hampshire, Dartmore, and Sedgemore, in Devonshire, and in some of the heathy hills of Somersetshire, which lie contiguous to Devonshire; and in Staffordshire and North Wales. They abound in the south and north of Scotland. The Earl of Fife has procured a breed of that splendid bird the capercalzie, or cock of the woods, which promises to increase. It is his Lordship's intention to turn them out at Marr Lodge, and endeavour to naturalize them; in which project there can be little doubt of his succeeding, as they were formerly plentiful in Scotland. The Virginian partridge has been successfully introduced into Staffordshire, and has become abundant, and spread over part of the adjoining counties. The red-legged partridge, a native of France, has lately been introduced into preserves in England with great success. Wherever it obtains ground, it drives the common species out of the preserves, and threatens in time, like the Norway rat, to exterminate the aboriginal race.- -ED.

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