NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 269 
but it was at the hermitage that the echoes and repercussions 
delighted the hearers ; not only filling the Lythe with the roar, as 
if all the beeches were tearing up by the roots ; but, turning to the 
left, they pervaded the vale above Combwood ponds, and after a 
pause seemed to take up the crash again, and to extend round 
Hartley Hangers, and to die away at last among the coppices and 
coverts of Ward-le-Ham. It has been remarked before that this 
district is an Anathoth, a place of responses or echoes, and there- 
fore proper for such experiments: we may farther add that the 
pauses in echoes, when they cease and yet are taken up again, like 
the pauses in music, surprise the hearers, and have a fine effect on 
the imagination. 
The gentleman above-mentioned has just fixed a barometer in his 
parlour at Newton Valence. The tube was first filled here (at 
Selborne) twice with care, when the mercury agreed and stood 
exactly with my own ; but, being filled twice again at Newton, the 
mercury stood, on account of the great elevation of that house, 
three-tenths of an inch lower than the barometers at this village, 
and so continues to do, be the weight of the atmosphere what it 
may. The plate of the barometer at Newton is figured as low as 
27; because in stormy weather the mercury there will sometimes 
descend below 28. We have supposed Newton House to stand two 
hundred feet higher than this house: but if the rule holds good, 
which says that mercury in a barometer sinks one-tenth of an inch 
for every hundred feet elevation, then the Newton barometer, by 
standing three-tenths lower than that of Selborne, proves that 
Newton House must be three hundred feet higher than that in 
which I am writing, instead of two hundred. 
It may not be impertinent to add, that the barometers at Selborne 
stand three-tenths of an inch lower than the barometers at South 
Lambeth : whence we may conclude that the former place is about 
three hundred feet higher than the latter; and with good reason, 
because the streams that rise with us run into the Thames at Wey- 
bridge, and so to London. Of course, therefore, there must be 
lower ground all the way from Selborne to South Lambeth; the 
distance between which, all the windings and indentings of the 
streams considered, cannot be less than an hundred miles. 
I am, &c. 
