The Natural History of Selborne

Full moon.  High tides frequently discompose the weather in places so near the coast, even in the dryest, most settled season, for a day or two.

*Cimices lineares are now in high copulation on ponds & pools.  The females, who vastly exceed the males in bulk, dart & shoot along the surface of the water with the males on their backs.  When a female chuses to be disenegaged, she rears & jumps & plunges like an unruly colt; the lover, thus dismounted, soon finds a new mate.  The females as fast as their curiosities are satisfied retire to another part of the lake, perhaps to deposit their foetus in quiet: hence the sexes are found separate except where generation is going-on.  From the multitude of minute young of all gradations of size, thses insects seem without doubt to be viviparous.

Broods of flycatchers come out.

Timothy, Mrs Snookes’ old tortoise has been kept full 30 years in her court before the house, wieghs six pounds three quarters, & one ounce.  It was never weighed before, but seems to be much grown since it came.

Multitudes of swallows of the first brood cluster on the Scotch-firs.  The swifts, or the bulk of them, departed from Fyfield, about this day.

Little wheat housed.  Wheat is very fine in general.  A young cuckow is hatched every year in some part of Mrs Snooke’s outlet, most usually by red-breasts.  No cross-bills this year among the scotch pines. They usually appear about the beginning of July.  No fern-owls.

Female viper taken full of young, 15 in number: gaped & menaced as soon as they were out of the belly of their dams.

Wheat harvest is general all about the downs.  When I came just beyond Findon I found wheatear traps which had been open’d about a week.  The shepherds usually begin catching about the last week in July.

Small rain, sun, & clouds.

Horses at plow so teized by flies as to be quite frantic.  Horses are never tormenteed in that manner ’til after midsumr: the people say it is the nose-fly that distracts them so.  I can discover only such flies as haunt the heads of horses: perhaps at this season they lay their eggs in the nose & ears.  I never can discern any oestrus on those days, only swarms of small muscae.

By this evenings post I am informed, by a Gent. who is just come from thence that the hops all round Canterbury have failed:  there are many hundred acres not worth picking.