industrious, and live comfortably in good stone or brick cottages, which are glazed, and have chambers above stairs: mud buildings we have none. Besides the employment from husbandry, the men work in hop gardens, of which we have many, and fell and bark timber. In the spring and summer the women weed the corn; and enjoy a second harvest in September by hop-picking. Formerly, in the dead months, they availed themselves greatly by spinning wool, for making of barragons, a genteel corded stuff, much in vogue at that time for summer wear, and chiefly manufactured at Alton, a neighbouring town, by some of the people

From 1720 to

Total of baptisms of Males

Total of baptisms from 1720 to 1779, both inclusive (60 years) 980.
Average of burials for 60 years.

From 1740 M. 4,6

Females 465

From 1760

to

F. 3,8

1749, incl.

From 1750

10,6

M: 1,9 10,0

years inclu.

1759, incl.

}

1769, incl.
From 1770

to

1779, incl.

F. 6, S

11,7

Total of burials from 1720 to 1779, both inclusive (60 years) 640.
Baptisms exceed burials by more than one third.

Baptisms of Males exceed Females by one tenth, or one in ten.

Burials of Females exceed Males by one in thirty.

It appears that a child, born and bred in this parish, has an equal chance to live above forty

years.

Twins thirteen times, many of whom dying young have lessened the chances for life.
Chances for life in men and women appear to be equal.

A TABLE OF THE BAPTISMS, BURIALS, AND MARRIAGES, FROM JANUARY 2, 1761, To DECEMBER 25, 1780, IN THE PARISH OF SELBORNE.

During this period of twenty years the births of males exceeded those of females - - 10.

The burials of each sex were equal.
And the births exceeded the deaths - - 140.

called Quakers: but from circumstances this trade is at an end.* The inhabitants enjoy a good share of health and longevity; and the parish swarms with children.

LETTER VI. To T. PENNANT, Esa.

SHOULD I omit to describe with some exactness the forest of Wolmer, of which three-fifths perhaps lie in this parish, my account of Selborne would be very imperfect, as it is a district abounding with many curious productions, both animal and vegetable, and has often afforded me much entertainment both as a sportsman and as a naturalist.

The royal forest of Wolmer is a tract of land of about seven miles in length, by two and a half in breadth, running nearly from north to south, and is abutted on, to begin to the south, and so to proceed eastward, by the parishes of Greatham, Lysse, Rogate, and Trotton, in the county of Sussex, by Bramshot, Hedleigh, and Kingsley. This royalty consists entirely of sand covered with heath and fern; but is somewhat diversified with hills and dales, without having one standing tree in the whole extent. In the bottoms, where the waters stagnate, are many bogs, which formerly abounded with subterraneous trees; though Dr. Plot says positively,† that "there never were any fallen trees hidden in the mosses of the southern counties." But he was mistaken; for I myself have seen cottages on the verge of this wild district, whose timbers consisted of a black hard wood, looking like oak, which the owners assured me they procured from the bogs by probing the soil with spits, or some such instruments; but the peat is so much cut out, and the moors have been so well examined, that none has been found of late.‡

Since the passage above was written, I am happy in being able to say that the spinning employment is a little revived, to the no small comfort of the industrious housewife.

† See his Hist. of Staffordshire.

Old people have assured me that on a winter's morning they have discovered these trees, in the bogs, by the hoar frost, which lay longer over the space where they were concealed than on the surrounding morass. Nor does this seem to be a fanciful notion, but consistent with true philosophy. Dr. Hales saith, "That the warmth of the earth, at some depth under ground, has an influence in promoting a thaw, as well as the change of the weather from a freezing to a thawing state, is manifest, from this observation, viz. Nov. 29, 1731, a little snow having tallen in the night, it was, by eleven the next morning, mostly melted away on the surface of the earth, except in several places in Bushy-park, where there were drains dug and covered with earth, on which the snow continued to lie, whether those drains were full of water or dry, as also where elm-pipes lay under ground: a plain proof this that those drains intercepted the warmth of the earth from ascending from greater depths below them; for the snow lay where the drain had

Besides the oak, I have also been shown pieces of fossil-wood of a paler colour and softer nature, which the inhabitants called fir; but, upon a nice examination, and trial by fire, I could discover nothing resinous in them; and therefore rather suppose that they were parts of a willow or alder, or some such aquatic

tree.

This lonely domain is a very agreeable haunt for many sorts of wild fowls, which not only frequent it in the winter, but breed there in the summer; such as lapwings, snipes, wild-ducks, and, as I have discovered within these few years, teals. Partridges in vast plenty are bred in good seasons on the verge of this forest, into which they love to make excursions; and in particular, in the dry summer of 1740 and 1741, and some years after, they swarmed to such a degree, that parties of unreasonable sportsmen killed twenty and sometimes thirty brace in a day. But there was a nobler species of game in this forest, now extinct, which I have heard old people say abounded much before shooting flying became so common, and that was the heath-cock, black game, or grouse. When I was a little boy I recollect one coming now and then to my father's table. The last pack remembered was killed about thirty-five years ago; and within these ten years one solitary grey hen was sprung by some beagles in beating for a hare. The sportsmen cried out, "A hen pheasant;" but a gentleman present, who had often seen grouse in the north of England, assured me that it was a grey hen.*

Black Grouse.

more than four feet depth of earth over it. It continued also to lie on thatch, tiles, and the tops of wails." See Hales's Hæmastatics, p. 360. Quere, Might not such observations be reduced to domestic use, by promoting the discovery of old obliterated drains and wells about houses; and in Roman stations and camps lead to the finding of pavements baths, and graves, and other hidden relics of curious antiquity?

This fine species, the tetrao tetrix or black grouse, inhabits every where less elevated situations than the other British species which by sportsmen are termed grouse, being found, though at present nowhere very plentifully, in the south of England, wherever there are heathy wilds of sufficient extent, intermingled here and there with coppice, or brushwood, and patches of boggy ground. They occur sparingly upon the Devonshire moors and other heathy districts in the western counties, also, rather more abundantly, in the New-forest, Hants., and now and then a solitary individual may be flushed on the extensive moorland range of Hounslow and Bagshots but their principal localities lie more to the north, upon the lower slopes of heathy and mountainous regions, which are covered with a natural growth of willow, birch, and alder, and intersected by morasses, clothed with coarse herbage, also the deep and wooded dells which so com monly occur in the valleys between the mountains. They subsist (all the poultry tribes being nearly omnivorous) on various kinds of food, according to the season, as insects, the different

Nor does the loss of our black game prove the only gap in the fauna Selborniensis; for another beautiful link in the chain of beings is wanting, I mean the red deer, which towards the beginning of this century amounted to about five hundred head, and made

wild berries, and the seeds of various rushes and other plants, but chiefly on the young and tender shoots of the heath; and, in winter, when these are no longer procurable, upon the buds and tops of the birch and wild alder, and the embryo shoots of the different firs. These they can readily obtain, as unlike the ptarmigan (lagopus), to which genus the red grouse of sportsmen belongs, they are capable of perching upon trees, and always retire to roost at night, like pheasants, on a horizontal bough. They frequently descend, too, in the vicinity of cultivation, to peck some grain in the cornfields. The black grouse also differs from the red, and the other members of the genus lagopus, in being a polygamous bird, as indeed are all those which now range in tetrao. The latter considerably resemble, in their manners, the common domestic poultry, and the males of them spread the tail, and strut, and drop their wings in the style of the turkey and pea-fowl, a habit which is observed in no species of the ptarmigan genus, nor in any monogamous kind with which I am acquainted, but which is curiously noticeable in the cow-bunting of Wilson's "American Ornithology," the only known member of the extensive natural family to which it belongs which is not so. Most polygamous birds are indeed provided, at least in the breeding season, with some kind of curious display, and this is remarkably exemplified in the case of the ruff (machetes variabilis), the only known species of its numerous tribe which does not pair, and also the only one which is adorned in spring with a singular mass of produced feathers about the head and neck. The true grouse hybridize very readily in confinement with

a stately appearance.* There is an old keeper, now alive, named Adams, whose great grandfather (mentioned in a perambulation taken in 1635), grandfather, father, and self, enjoyed the head keepership of Wolmer forest in succession for more than a hundred years. This person assures me, that his father has often told him, that Queen Anne, as she was journeying on the Portsmouth road, did not think the forest of Wolmer beneath her royal regard. For she came out of the great road at Lippock, which is just by, and, reposing herself on a bank smoothed for that purpose, lying about half a mile to the east of Wolmer pond, and still called Queen's-bank, saw with great complacency and satisfaction the whole herd of red deer brought by the keepers along the vale before her, consisting then of about five hundred head. A sight this worthy the attention of the greatest sovereign! But he further adds that, by means of the Waltham blacks, or, to use his own expression, as soon as they began blacking, they were reduced to about fifty head, and so continued decreasing till the time of the late duke of Cumberland. It is now more than thirty years ago that his highness sent down a huntsman, and six yeomen-prickers, in scarlet jackets laced with gold, attended by the stag-hounds, ordering them to take every deer in this forest alive and to convey them in carts to Windsor. In the course of the summer they caught every stag, some of which showed extraordinary diversion; but, in the following winter, when the hinds were also carried off, such fine chases were exhibited as served the country people for matter of talk and won

the pheasants and allied genera; and, even in the wild state, mule specimens have several times been met with between the male pheasant and the female black grouse. There is reason, however, to believe that these crossings only take place in localities where the male black grouse have been destroyed. They are interesting, as indicative of me close affinity between the genera tetrao and phasianus, and they sufficiently attest the absurdity of classifying these, as some have done, as the types of two separate and distinct families. The males of most polygamous birds are very careless about the welfare of their progeny, but this is not the case with the black grouse; for, when his females are sttting, and while his numerous brood continue young and helpless, he acts as sentinel and keeps watch over the safety of them all. The young begin to throw out the mature plumage some time before they are quite full grown, and the males then separate from the rest and associate in small flocks or packs, continuing thus together till the influence of the vernal season prompts them to disperse over the wilds, at which time, as might be expected, very desperate battles continually take place among them. It will be observed that in these habits, which are common to all the genuine tetraones, and certain allied genera, a curious and highly interesting analogy may be traced with particular groups of ruminant mammifers, an analogy which I believe has never heretofore been remarked.-ED.

These noble and majestic animals, the red deer or stag (cervus elephas), a species truly indigenous to the country (as its fossil remains abundantly show), are now comparatively very few in any part of England; but the case is different in the mountainous regions of North Britain, where, especially on the duke of Athol's vast estates, in the central Grampians, immense herds of them still roam uurestrained, the splendid and appropriate ornaments of that wild and rngged country. In the south of England they can only be considered as park animals.—ED.