The Natural History of Selborne

Ice in the roads bears horse & man.  Vast halo round the moon.  The landsprings in part of N. Tidworth street not fordable: they run like a vast river.

The sheep on the downs are very ragged & their coats much torn: the shepherds say they tear their fleeces with their own mouths, & horns: & that they are always in that way in mild wet winters, being teized & tickled with a kind of lice.

Wood-lark whistles.  Hogs carry straw.

Foul, stormy day.  Mezereon & groundsel blow.

The bunting, emberiza alba, appears in great flocks about Bradley.  Linnets congregate in vast flocks, & make a kind of singing as they sit on trees.  Rooks resort to their nest-trees.  Hepaticas, winter-aconite, wall-flowers, daiseys, polyanths, black hellebores blow.  Wheat looks well on ye downs.

The ground is much dryed: people plow comfortably.  Wheat comes up well.

Hen chaffinches flock.

Nuthatch chatters.  It chatters as it flies.

A wet season began about the 9th of June, which lasted thro’ haymaking, harvest, & seed-time, & did infinite mischief to the country.  It appears from my Brother Barker’s instrument, with which he measures the quantity of rain, that more water fell in the county of Rutland in the year 1768 from Jan. the 1 to Dec 31 than in any other Calendar year for 30 years past; viz. 30 1/2 inches.  A mean year’s rain in Rutland is about 20 3/4 inches.

Weather more like April than ye end of December.  Hedge-sparrow sings.