The Natural History of Selborne

The farmers talk much that wheat is blighted. Kidney-beans do not thrive.

Young red-breasts, a second brood.  Notwithstanding the showery season, the aphides encrease on the hops.

Mushrooms appear on the short Lythe.

Vast crop of goose-berries: white currans very fine.

The hedge-sparrow feeds the young cuckow in it’s cage.

Mr White of Newton finds mushrooms in his fir-avenue.  Tremella abounds in my grass-walks.

Hops are dioecious plants: hence perhaps it might be proper, tho’ not practised, to leave purposely some male plants in every garden, that their farina might impregnate the blossoms. The female plants without their male attendants are not in their natural state: hence we may suppose the frequent failure of crop so incident to hop grounds.  No ther growth, cultivated by man, has such frequent & general failures as hops.

Daniel Wheeler’s boy found a young fledge cuckow in the nest of an hedge-sparrow.  Under the nest lay an egg of the hedge-sparrow, which looked as if it had been sucked.  In the late hot weather the cock bird has been crying much in the neighbourhood of the nest, but not since last week.

The apricots drop off in a surprizing manner.  Planted a bed of Savoys.

Planted a line of kidney-beans

Preserved some Duke cherries, very fine fruit.  The pupils of the eyes of animals are diversifyed: in all the birds & fishes I have seen they are round, as in men: but those of horses, & cows, & sheep & goats & I think deer & camels, are oblong from corner to corner of the eye.  The pupils of the domestic cat differ from those of all other quadrupeds; for they are long & narrow, yet capable of great dilation, & standing near at right angles with the opening of the eye-lids.  The eys of wasps are said to be lunated in the shape of a crescent.