172 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



LETTER XVII. 



RINGMER, near LEWES, Dec. tyh, 1773. 



DEAR SIR, I received your last favour just as I was setting out 

 for this place ; and am pleased to find that my monography met 

 with your approbation. My remarks are the result of many years' 

 observation ; and are I trust true in the whole, though I do not 

 pretend to say that they are perfectly void of mistake, or that a 

 more nice observer might not make many additions, since subjects 

 of this kind are inexhaustible. 



If you think my letter worthy the notice of your respectable 

 society, you are at liberty to lay it before them ; and they will 

 consider it, I hope, as it was intended, as a humble attempt to 

 promote a more minute inquiry into natural history ; into the life 

 and conversation of animals. Perhaps, hereafter, I may be induced 

 to take the house-swallow under consideration; and from that 

 proceed to the rest of the British hirundines. 



Though I have now travelled the Sussex Downs upwards 01 

 thirty years, yet I still investigate that chain of majestic mountains 

 with fresh admiration year by year ; and I think I see new beauties 

 every time I traverse it. This range, which runs from Chichester 

 eastward as far as East Bourn, is about sixty miles in length, and 

 is called the South Downs, properly speaking, only round Lewes. 

 As you pass along you command a noble view of the wild, or 

 weald, on one hand, and the broad downs and sea on the other. 

 Mr. Ray used to visit a family just at the foot of these hills, and 

 was so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton Plain, near 

 Lewes, that he mentions those scapes in his " Wisdom of God 

 in the Works of the Creation" with the utmost satisfaction, and 

 thinks them equal to anything he had seen in the finest parts of 

 Europe. 



For my own part, I think there is somewhat peculiarly sweet 

 and amusing in the shapely-figured aspect of chalk-hills in prefer- 

 ence to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and 

 shapeless. 



