The Natural History of Selborne

Summer-like: the air is full of gossamer, & insects.

Few worms lie-out on the common.

Vat condensations on walls & wainscot, which run in streams; these things are colder than the warm wet air.

Worms lie-out very thick on the walks, & grass-plot; many in copulation.  They are very venereous, & seem to engender all the year.

When the thermr is at 50 flies & phalaenae come-out, & bats are often stirring.  Beetles flie.

The nuthatch hunts for nuts in the hedges, & brings them to the forked bough of a certain plum-tree, where it opens them by picking a ragged irregular hole in the small end of the shell.  It throws the empty shell on the walk.

A man brought me a common sea-gull alive: three crows had got it down in a field, & were endeavouring to demolish it.

The ground was covered with snow at Buxton in Derbyshire.

The thatch is torn by the wind.

Mrs. Snooke’s old tortoise at Ringmer went under ground.