The Natural History of Selborne

Nightingales visit my fields & sing awhile: but withdraw, & travel on: some years they  breed with me.

Sowed the Ewel-close, now barley, with 12 pounds of white clover, two bushels of Rye-grass, & a quarter of meadow-grass seeds from a farmer’s hay-loft.  The ground is too wet, & will not harrow well.  Strong wheat-land.

The king & queen are this day at Portsmouth to see the fleet at Spithead.  There were five general running firings, which shook my house & made the windows jar.  The firings were at ten, twelve, on, four.

INSERT: A day or two before any house-martins had been observed, Thomas Hoar distinctly heard pretty late one evening the twittering notes of those birds from under the eaves of my brewhouse, between the ceiling & the thatch. Now the quere is, whether those birds had harboured there the winter thro’, and were just awakening from their slumbers, or whether they had only just taken possession of that place unnoticed, & were lately arrived from some distant district. If the former was the case, they went not far to seek for a Hybernaculum, since they nestle every year along the eaves of that building. Mr Derham wrote word to the R. Society “that some time before any Swifts had been seen, (I think before the month of March was out), he head them squeaking behind the weather-tiles on the front of his parsonage-house.” It is a pity that so curious a Naturalist did not proceed to the taking-down some of the tiles, that he might have satisfyed his eyes as well as his hearing. As a notion had prevailed that Hirundines at first coming were lean & emaciated, I procured an H. martin to be shot as soon as it appeared: but the bird, when it come to be opened, was fat & fleshy. It’s stomach was full of the legs & wings of small coleoptera. There can be no doubt that the Horn shown to me at Mr Lever’s museum, vast as it was, belonged to the Genus of Bos: for it was concavum, antrorum verum lunatum laeve: whereas had it related to the Genus of Capra, it would have been concavum, sursum versum, erectum, scabrum. Neither can it by any means belong to the genus of Cervus, for then it would have been concavum, retorsum versum, intortum, rugosum. It must therefore of course have belonged to the Genus of Bos.

The Lathraea squammaria, a rare plant, is just discovered in bloom in the Litton-coppice at Selborne, just below the church, near the foot-bridge.

Frost, snow-storm.

Sun, showers of hail & sleet.

The little laughing yellow wren whistles.

Planted three beds of asparagus.  Planted potatoes.  No swallow.

One beech is in full leaf in the Lythe.