The great oak in Harteley avenue, just as you enter the pasture-field, measures in girth 14 feet. It is a noble tree, & if sound worth many pounds. Why it was left at the general sale does not appear. The girth was taken at four feet above the ground.
Many horse-beans sprang up in my field-walks in the autumn, & are now grown to a considerable height. As the Ewel was in beans last summer, it is most likely that these seeds came from thence; but the distance is too considerable for them to have been conveyed by mice. It is most probably therefore that they were brought by birds, & in particular, by jays & pies, who seem to have hid them among the grass, & moss, & then to have forgotten where they had stowed them. Some pease are also growing in the same situation, & probably under the same circumstances. Mr Derham has recorded that mice hide acorns one by one in pastures in the autumn; & that he has observed them to be hunted-out by swine, who discovered them by their smell.
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