The Natural History of Selborne

Bright, sun, golden even. Cut eight cucumbers. Mrs. Clement & children left us. Many swifts.

A man brought me a large plate of straw-berries, which were crude, & not near ripe.  The ground all as hard as iron: we can sow nothing nor plant out.

Cut five cucumbers.

From London three gallons of French brandy, & two gallons of Jamaica rum.

Made rasp, & curran jam, & jelly.

Began to use green goose-berries.

My table abounds with lettuces, that have stood the winter; radishes; spinage; cucumbers; with a moderate crop of asparagus.

3 gallons of brandy from London

It has been observed that divers flies, besides their sharp, hooked nails, have also skinny palms or flaps to their feet, whereby they are enabled to stick on glass & other smooth bodies, & to walk on ceilings with their backs downward, by means of the pressure of the atmosphere on those flaps.  The weight of which they easily overcome in cold weather when they are brisk and alert.  But in the decline of the year, this resistance becomes too mighty for their diminished strength; & we see flies labouring along, & lugging their feet in windows as if they stuck fast to the glass, & it is with the utmost difficulty they can draw one foot after another, & disengage their hollow caps from the slippery surface.  Upon the same principle that flies stick, & support themselves, do boys, by way of play, carry heavy weights by only a piece of wet leather at the end of a string clapped close on the surface of a stone.  Tho’ the Virgoloeuse pears always rot before they ripen, & are eatble, yet when baked dry on  a tin, they become an excellent sweet-meat.

Nep. B. White left us, & went to London.  It was with difficulty that we procured water enough for  brewing from my well.