The Natural History of Selborne

Vast rain, an inch & a quarter in 8 hours.

Wheat-harvest will be backward.  Mr White’s tank at Newton runds over; but Captain Dumaresque’s, which is much larger, is not full.

Rooks in vast flocks return to the deep woods at half past 8 o’clock in the evening.

The farmers talk much that wheat is blighted. Kidney-beans do not thrive.

Young red-breasts, a second brood.  Notwithstanding the showery season, the aphides encrease on the hops.

Mushrooms appear on the short Lythe.

Vast crop of goose-berries: white currans very fine.

The hedge-sparrow feeds the young cuckow in it’s cage.

Mr White of Newton finds mushrooms in his fir-avenue.  Tremella abounds in my grass-walks.

Hops are dioecious plants: hence perhaps it might be proper, tho’ not practised, to leave purposely some male plants in every garden, that their farina might impregnate the blossoms. The female plants without their male attendants are not in their natural state: hence we may suppose the frequent failure of crop so incident to hop grounds.  No ther growth, cultivated by man, has such frequent & general failures as hops.

Daniel Wheeler’s boy found a young fledge cuckow in the nest of an hedge-sparrow.  Under the nest lay an egg of the hedge-sparrow, which looked as if it had been sucked.  In the late hot weather the cock bird has been crying much in the neighbourhood of the nest, but not since last week.