The Natural History of Selborne

Mrs Clement, & six of her children, four of which are to inoculated, & Mrs Chandler, & her two children the youngest of which is also to undergo the same operation, are rettired to Harteley great house.  Servants & all, some of which are to be inoculated also, they make 14 in a family.

On this day Lord Stawell sent me a rare & curious water-fowl, taken alive a few days before by a boy at Basing, near Basingstoke, & sent to the Duke of Bolton at Hackwood park, where it was put into the bason before the house, in which it soon dyed.  This bird proved to be the Procellaria Puffinus of Linnaeus, the Manks puffin, or Shear-water of Ray.  Shear-waters breed in the Calf of Man, & as Ray supposes, in the Scilly Isles, & also in the Orkines: but quit our rocks & shores about the latter end of August; & from accounts lately given by navigators, are dispersed over the whole Atlantic.  By what chance or accident this bird was impelled to visit Hants is a question that can not easily be answered.

My tall beech in Sparrow’s hanger, which measured 50 feet to the first fork, & 42 afterwards, is just 6 feet in girth at 2 feet above the ground.  At the back of Burhant house, in an abrupt field which inclines towards nightingale-lane, stand four noble beech-trees on the edge of a steep ravin or water gully the largest of which measures 9 ft. 5. in. at about a yard from the ground.  This ravin runs with a strong torrent in winter from nightingale-lane, but is dry in the summer.  The beeches above are now the finest remaining in the neighbourhood, & carry fine heads.  There is a romantic, perennial spring in this gully, that might be rendered very ornamental was it situated in a gentleman’s outlet.

Martins congregate on the weather-cock, & vane of the may-pole.  The boys brought me their first wasps nest from Kimber’s; it was near as big as a gallon.  When there is no fruit, as is remarkably the case this year, wasps eat flies, & suck the honey from flowers, from ivy blossoms, & umbellated plants: they carry-off also flesh from butcher’s shambles.

Cut 100 cucumbers. Sweet autumnal weather.

Onions rot.  Barley round the village very fine.

Cut 158 cucumbers.  Nep. Ben White, & wife, & little Ben & Glyd came from Fyfield.

Cut 140 cucumbers.  Hops light, & not very good.  Sister Barker & Molly & Betsy left us, & went to London: Charles White also, & Bessy returned to Fyfield.

Two stone-curlews in a fallow near Southington.  A fern-owl flies over my house.

Hardly here and there a wasp to be seen.