The Natural History of Selborne

The crop of stoneless berberries is prodigious!  Among the many sorts of people that are injured by this very wet summer, the peat-cutters are great sufferers:  for they have not disposed of half the peat & turf which they ave prepared; & the poor have lost their season for laying in their forest fuel.  The brick-burner can get no dry heath to burn his lime, & bricks: nor can I house my cleft wood, which lies drenched in wet.  The brick-burner could never get his last makings of tiles & bricks dry enough for burning the autumn thro’ so they must be destroyed, & worked up again.  He had paid duty for them; but is, I understand, to be reimbursed.

William Dewye Senr. who is now living, has been a certificate man at Selborne since the year 1729, some time in the month of April. He is a parishioner at the town of Wimborn-Minster at the County of Dorset.

Took possession of Selborne curacy.

A fox ran up the street at noon-day.  No birds love to fly down the wind, which protrudes them too fast & hurries them out of their poise: besides it blows-up their feathers, & exposes them to the cold.  All birds love to perch as well a to fly with their heads to the windward.  FOOTNOTE:  The christenings at Faringdon near Alton, Hants from the year 1760 to 1777 inclusive were 152: the burials at the same place in the same period were 124.  So that the births exceed the deaths by 28.  I have buried many very old people there: yet of late several young folks have dyed of a decline.

The arbutus casts it’s blossoms & discloses the rudiments of its fruit.  In thses two instances fructifcation goes on the winter through.  Three martins in the street.  Gossamer on every bent.  *Bynstede, the name of a parish near us, signifies locus cultus, vel habitatus.  This barish abuts on a wild woodland district, which is a royal forest, & is called the Holt.  This parish was probably cultivated when all around were nothing but woodlands, & forests.