green, and the veins of ore are not above a foot deep in the fissures and in the solid rock, which contain lead ore sometimes up to the surface.

The following plants grow out of the soil which covers these arsenical sulphureous veins, and which is not above a foot deep. True oak, ilex, whose leaves fall; white-thorn, juniper; these are poor shrubs, because they are browsed by the goats. Cystus, wild-rose, uva-ursi, phlomis salviæ, fol. fl. luteo, verbascum of the highways, stochas, sage, thymum legitimum, clus, serpyllum, greater and lesser; rosemary, helianthemum, pimpinella, chamædris filipendula, stachys lychnoides, incana, angustifolia, flo. aureo. var. The great asphodel, coronilla of the meadows, gallium luteum, yarrow, campanula radice esculenta, a jacobea, which I saw grow in the sand of the sea side, and is all quite white. A gladiolus, and a little glaucium, which grow in corn-fields in Spain, leucanthemum of the meadows, orchis, ornithogalum, muscari, polygala, and above twenty kinds more, which are found likewise in meadows, corn-fields, highways, hedges, and sea-shores; yet the non-calcarious earth of this mineral hill is covered with the same sweet small grass as the rest of the country, even the lime-stone land. I made the same observations at the three greatest mines in Europe; St. Mary of the mines in Alsatia; Claustahl, in the Hartz-Mountains of Hanover; and Freyberg, in Saxony. The mines of St. Mary are at the head of a valley in the Voge-Mountains; its hills are some of them covered with oak and pines, others with apple, pear, plum, and cherry trees: others are fine green downs for sheep and cows, with a great variety of plants; others are fields of wheat, which the year 1759, (as I find it in my notes) gave a product of eight for one. All these things grow in a foot or two deep of soil, which covers a rock full of the most arsenical, sulphureous, silver, copper, lead, and cobalt, ores in Europe, and most of their veins near the surface.

The mines of Claustahl are in a plain, which is in truth the summit of a mountain. The Dorothy and Caroline veins of silver, lead, and copper ore stretch away eight miles to the Wildman Mountain. The finest meadows and sweetest grass are upon these veins and all their branches near the city; they feed 900 cows, and 200 horses. They are mowed in June; a second grass springs up, which is mowed in August. A multitude of plants grow in these meadows over the mines, as valerian, gallium fi. albo, coronilla, chrysanthemum segetum, leucanthemum, viola tricolor. bistort. bonus Henricus, St. John's wort, agrimony, ladies-mantle, tussilago, &c.

The mines of Freyberg are in the low hills near the city: I saw them all covered with barley in the month of July: a stranger would not imagine that men were reaping corn over hundreds of miners' heads, who were blowing up veins of ore, arsenic, and brimstone.

It is true I also saw mines in the barren naked mountains and hills, but it is certain that their barrenness is not the effect of mineral vapours. The air, moisture, heat, and cold, have more power over the surfaces of some rocks than others, to moulder the stone into earth; such is the high mountain Ramelsberg, at whose foot is the imperial city of Goslar, whose inhabitants live, and have lived these 900 years, by the mine of this steep, barren mountain. I crept up to its summit, and found it was split and cracked into millions of fissures, from a foot wide to a hair's breadth; that in other places the rock was shivered into small rotten stones, which, in some spots, were perfectly uncompounded and fallen into earth, from whence sprung a little grass, moss, and a few plants. In short, I saw that the time of its decay into vegetable mould was not yet come, and that the mountain Ramelsberg will be one day as green as Claustahl, which shews, I think, that the world is not so old as some men fancy. I will make no apology to Mr. Peter Collinson for this digression; I heard fame declare him twenty-three years ago an enemy to error; he must love truth, though he finds it placed out of order.

As my duty obliged me to pass hundreds of days at the Platilla mine of Molina, I saw thousands of sheep feed around it. I observed that when the shepherd made a pause, and let them feed at their will, they sought only for the fine grass, and never touched any aromatic plant; that when the creeping serpyllum was interwoven with the grass, the sheep industriously nosled it aside to bite a blade, which trouble. made them soon seek out a pure graminous spot. I observed too when the shepherd perceived a threatening cloud, and gave a signal to the dogs to collect the tribe, and then go behind it, walking apace himself to lead the sheep to shelter, that as they had no time to stoop they would take a snap of stochas, rosemary, or any other shrub in their way, for sheep will eat any thing when they are hungry, or when they walk fast. I saw them greedily devour henbane, hemlock, glaucium, and other nauseous weeds, upon their issue out of the shearing-house. If sheep loved aromatic plants, it would be one of the greatest misfortunes that could befal the farmers of Spain. The number of bee-hives is incredible; I am almost ashamed to give under my hand, that

I knew a parish priest who had 5000 hives. The bees suck all their honey, and gather all their wax from the aromatic flowers, which enamel aud perfume two thirds of the sheep walks. This priest cautiously seizes the queens in a small crape fly-catch, he clips off their wings: their majesties stay at home; he assured me that he never lost a swarm from the day of his discovery to the day he saw me, which I think was five years.

The shepherd's chief care is not to suffer the sheep to go out of their toils until the morning sun has exhaled the dew of a white frost, and never let them approach a rivulet or pond after a shower of hail; for if they should eat the dewy grass, or drink hail water, the whole tribe would become melancholy, fast, pine away, and die, as often happened. Hail water is so pernicious to men in this climate, that the people of Molina will not drink the river water after a violent shower of hail: experience taught the danger; but let it be never so muddy, and rise never so high after rain, they drink it without fear. Perhaps this may be the unheeded cause of many endemical-epidemics of other cities. The sheep of Andalusia who never travel, have coarse, long, hairy wool. I saw a flock in Estramadura whose wool trailed on the ground. The itinerant sheep have short, silky, white wool. I do believe from a few experiments, and long observation, that if the fine-wooled sheep stayed at home in the winter, their wool would become coarse in a few generations. If the coarse-wooled sheep travelled from climate to climate, and lived in the free air, their wool would become fine, short, and silky, in a few generations.

The fineness of the wool is due to the animal's passing its life in an open air of equal temperature. It is not colder in Andalusia and Estramadura in the winter than it is in the Montana or Molina in summer. There is little frost in Andalusia, sometimes it snows in June in Molina. I felt a cold day upon the least cloud in summer. Constant heat or constant cold, with housing, are the causes of coarse, black, and speckled wool. All the animals, I know, who live in the open air, constantly keep up to the colour of their sires. There are the most beautiful brindled sheep in the world among the coarse-wooled sheep of Spain. I never saw one amongst the fine-wooled flocks; the free but less abundant perspiration in the open air, is swept away as fast as it flows, whereas it is greatly increased by the excessive heat of numbers of sheep housed all night in a narrow place. It fouls the wool, makes it hairy, and changes its colour. The swine of Spain, who pass their lives in the woods, are all of one

colour, as the wild boars. They have fine, silky, curled bristles. Never did a Spanish hog's bristles pierce a shoe. What a quantity of dandruff is daily secerned from the glands of a stabled horse, the curry-comb and haircloth. ever in hand; how clean is the skin of a horse that lives in the open air!

OUR Parish Registers, to speak generally, were very ill kept during the time of the grand usurpation; but after the Restoration of King Charles II. that is, from the year 1660, the entries were more regularly made. The consequence of this has been, that, till of late years, it has been difficult to ascertain the ages of those people that pretended to exceed a century; but this can now, and at all times from henceforward, very easily be done. I shall here give you an instance of this, in a person who is at this instant upon record to be in her hundred and first year. In our register, at this place, the entry is,

Miria filia Ephraim Houlms bap. tricessimo Januarij 1663.

I must observe here, that my predecessor, James Hewet, sometimes wrote this christian name Miria, and sometimes Maria; and further, that he began the year the 25th of March. Now, this Mary Houlms, 1703, married George Stubbinge, and is now living, being the widow of the said Stubbinge, this 14th of June, 1764; from whence it appears she is now in her 101st year.

I say nothing of Mary Stubbinge's intellects, being of opinion, that notwithstanding what is said, now and then, in the papers, of people's enjoying their eye-sight, and their other senses, in great perfection to the last, it is very far from being a desirable thing, in a general way, to attain any such great age; Their strength then is but labour and

sorrow.

1764, July.

SAM. PEGGE, R.

XXXVIII. Remedy for the Sting of a Wasp in the Throat.

Leigh, Oct. 12.

MR. URBAN, READING lately in the public papers, of a man, who, by drinking beer in a cellar, did therewith swallow a wasp, which, stinging him in the throat, was the cause of his death, soon after; it induced me to offer you a similar case, but of a more fortunate consequence, that fell under my own practice and observation, to which, the other day, I was providentially the lucky instrument, by means of the following safe and simple medicine, of procuring both a speedy and effectual cure, and thereby, beyond expectation, of preserving my patient's life, of which I here send you the full account; that by your communicating the same to the public, it may hereafter conduce to the preservation of the lives of several others, who may at any time labour under the like dangerous accident. The whole story is this:

On the 2d day of September last, I was called up in the morning, in haste, to Samuel Stenhoe, a shipwright, of Burnham, who was at work on a vessel at this town. He, by drinking a mug of beer brought to him, much frothed upon the top, which thereby concealed a wasp, swallowed the insect; it stung him in the gullet; yet he continued caulking the hoy he was at work upon for some minutes after; till such a sudden and violent strangulation seized him, as constrained him to hurry to my house for assistance.

Wherefore, while I was, after the first notice, hastening on my clothes, and putting up a short prayer, or ejaculation rather, for success, I had a fresh call to be as expeditious as possible, or the person would be dead before I could see him, who waited below with his friend speechless, and black in the face, kicking, and flinging his limbs about for breath, with the utmost agony and consternation, expecting nothing else but sudden death every moment.

I bid him point to the place stung; he directed his finger to his throat, at the upper end of his breast bone, on the right side. It being a case I had never met with before, and having no time to lose, I quickened my thoughts, and soon concluded all manual operations, as with those who are choked with other kinds of extraneous bodies, would excite, instead of mitigating the spasmodic strangulation; when the following method came suddenly into my mind,