Ayles Holt, alias Alice Holt,* as it is called in old records, is held by grant from the crown for a term of years. The grantees that the author remembers are, BrigadierGeneral 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. 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 froin 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 are never seen within the limits of Wolmer; nor were the red deer of "In Rot. Inquisit. de statu forest. in Scaccar. 36 Ed. III, it is called Aisholt." In the same, "Tit. Woolmer and Aisholt Hantisc. Dominus Rex habet unam capellam in haia suâ de Kingesle." "Haia, sepes, sepimentum, parcus: a Gall. haie and haye."- SPELMAN'S Glossary. This prince was the inventor of mezzotinto. The invention of mezzotinto engraving is generally ascribed to Prince Rupert ; but, in Elme's Life of Sir Christopher Wren, it is given to that eminent architect. The journals of the Royal Society, for October 1, 1662, record that Dr Wren presented some cuts, done by himself, in a new way; whereby he could almost as soon do a subject on a plate of brass or copper, as another could draw it with a crayon on paper. On this subject, the editor of Parentalia speaks with decision, that "he was the first inventor of the art of engraving in mezzotinto; which was afterwards prosecuted and improved by his Royal Highness Prince Rupert, in a manner somewhat different, upon the suggestion, as it is said, of the learned John Evelyn, Esq."-ED. 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 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. * There is a curious fact, not generally known, which is, that at one period the horns of stags grew into a much greater number of ramifications than at the present day. Some have supposed this to have arisen from the greater abundance of food, and from the animal having more repose, before population became so dense. In some individuals these multiplied to an extraordinary extent. There is one in the museum of Hesse Cassel with twenty-eight antlers. Baron Cuvier mentions one with sixty-six, or thirty-three on each horn. ED. †The superiority of wood cut in winter arises from its being divested of sap at that season of the year. Timber felled in summer is liable to crack, and is very subject to the dry-rot; both of which are caused by the sap not having properly escaped in the process of drying. The sap rises only in the spring, and descends at the fall of the year.-ED. LETTER X. TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. 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 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 towards 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 11th, and young martens (hirundines urbica) were *That a few solitary instances of swallows remaining in this country, in a state of torpidity, have occurred, there can be little doubt; but that they generally hybernate is out of the question. Charles Lucian Bonaparte, in a letter to the Secretary of the Linnæn Society, dated from on board the Delaware, near Gibraltar, March 20, 1828, says," A few days ago, being five hundred miles from the coasts of Portugal, four hundred from those of Africa, we were agreeably surprised by the appearance of a few swallows, (hirundo urbica and rustica.) This, however extraordinary, might have been explained by an easterly gale, which might have cut off the swallows migrating from the main to Madeira, only two hundred miles distant from us; but what was my surprise in observing several small warblers popping about the deck and rigging. These poor little strangers were soon caught and brought to These warblers were the sylvia trochilus, or hay bird, &c.—2 me. -ED. 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 martens 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-marten, 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-martens on the 7th of November. * The martens 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 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 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. The latest time which the swift has been known to remain in this country was till September 15, in the year 1817. Two or three were seen sporting about with the large assemblies of swallows and martens, by the sea side, near Penzance, to the eastward. These birds, there can be little doubt, were on their passage from this country to a more southern climate. The swallow (H. rustica) was seen, by the Rev. W. T. Bree, in the year 1806, so late as November 20; and Mr Sweet mentions having seen one pass over his garden, near London, November 23, 1828 The day was fine, and flies plentiful; but, he asks, how did it subsist during the severe frosty days that were past? The earliest period noticed by that keen observer of nature is on the 3d April, 1803; while he records having seen the sand-marten (H. riparia) on the 31st March, in the years 1818 and 1822, the former at Penzance, and adds, "I have been informed by an intelligent friend, that a house-swallow once took up its residence late in the autumn within St Mary's Church at Warwick, and was regularly observed there by the congregation until Christmas eve, after which it disappeared, and was seen no more.' These birds arrive in the following order: - The sand-marten, the house-swallow, house-marten, swift.ED. The grasshopper lark. -ED. 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 in 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 webfooted 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 Linnæus, (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 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 reliquiæ!" 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 *The three species are, the one mentioned in the text, the common willow-wren, and the least willow-wren, or chiff-chaff. -ED. + The black-cap is unquestionably migratory; it appears about the middle of April and retires in September. - En. |