The Natural History of Selborne

Made five bottles, & a pint of catsup.

Earwigs damage the wall-fruit before it gets ripe, warm & moist. Young fowls die at Newton. Mushrooms are brought in the great plenty.

We kept a young fern-owl for several days in a cage, & fed it with bread, & milk.  It was moping, & mute by day; but, being a night bird, began to be alert as soon as it was dusk. *Sent it back to the brakes among which it was first found.

Mushrooms are brought me from Hartley.  I do not meet with one wasp.  Young fern-owls are found, a second brood.

Kidney-beans bear by heaps; & cucumbers abound.  Coveys of partidges are said to be very large.  Butchers meat keeps badly.

Mushrooms come in Mr White’s avenue at Newton.

Colchicum blows.

Say what retards, amidst the summer’s blaze/ Th’autumnal bulb, ’till pale, declining days?

Planted cuttings of dames violets, & slips of pinks under hand-glasses: planted also more sweet williams, & polyanths.

Mrs Ben White, by being delivered of a boy this morning, has encreased my nephews, & nieces to the number of 46.

The fallows of good husbandmen are in a fine crumbling state, & very clean.  Sowed a crop of prickly-seeded spinage to stand the winter: the ground was very hard & cloddy, & would not rake; so we levelled it down as well as we could with a garden-roller, & sprinkled it over with fine, dustly mould to cover the seeds.