122 



LEAVES FROM THE NOTE-BOOK OF A NATURALIST. 



PART XIV. 



EVENTS come round in cycles. In 1750, the 

 winter was as mild as that which has just passed, 

 and the spring very early. In Sweden, the 

 " steel nights," which are generally felt in all 

 their rigor somewhere about the last week in 

 February, were so entirely absent, that lands 

 were sown in Upland in that week ; the usual 

 time for sowing in Sweden seldom arriving before 

 April. Harald Barck, who records this unusual 

 mildness and its consequences, adds, that he is not 

 ignorant that the lands in some of the northern 

 provinces, especially those which abound in clay, 

 require early sowing, that the ground may be 

 broken with less trouble, and that the first shoots 

 of .the barley may make their way through it 

 before it grows stiff. He adds, that the people 

 of Schonen, and others that dwell near the sea, 

 sow late, whether the spring be early or not ; and 

 that sometimes to their great loss, for no other 

 reason than that they received this custom from 

 their ancestors. The most northern inhabitants 

 of Sweden find it necessary to sow as soon as the 

 frost breaks up, that the short summer may per- 

 fectly ripen the grain before the winter approaches. 

 For as eggs require a fixed time for the exclusion 

 of the young, so the barley does in different 

 provinces to ripen the seed.* Harald then gives 

 a table of the times of sowing in different local- 

 ities, in different years, the latest time being the 

 18th of June, and the earliest the 16th of April. 

 He concludes, from these observations, that the 

 sowing of barley nearly coincides with the folia- 

 tion of the birch, at least in Upland, and other 

 places adjacent. He remarks, that it is a popular 

 error, that less time passes between the sowing 

 and ripening of wheat in their northern provinces 

 than at Upsal, and that this happens, because the 

 summer days are longer in the north, and there is 

 scarcely any night to retard its growth. But this 

 error is made evident by the grain ripening in as 

 short a time in Schonen as in Lapland ; for bar- 

 ley, in the champaign part of Schonen, is sown 

 about the 29th of May, and reaped sooner than in 

 Upland. But why barley ripens later in Upland 

 and Wessmania, than in the other provinces of 

 Sweden, he confesses to be an absolute secret to 

 him.f 



With us, though Aquarius has been predomi- 

 nant, there has been hardly any freezing none of 

 any consequence though as late as the 12th of 

 February, I saw ice on the water in St. James' 

 Park, as if Jack Frost was determined to show 

 that his power was not utterly extinct. But the 

 yellow aconite and primroses were in bloom early 

 in January ; and on the 10th of that month, 

 baskets full of them were exposed for sale in 

 Covent Garden Market. On the 12th the posies 

 of wall-flowers, polyanthuses, and garden anemo- 

 nes, were hawked about the streets ; and on the 

 19th, wall-flowers, with some of the blossoms ex- 



* Amaen. Acad. 



t Ibid. 



panded, which had been dug up for planting in 

 the suburbs, and in the broken pan of the artisan, 

 to remind him that there is such a place as the 

 country, which he is beginning to forget, were 

 pitched there in full panniers. On the llth and 

 12th of February, crocuses were to be seen 

 expanding their golden chalices in some of the 

 miniature London gardens gardens which, as the 

 late Lord Canterbury said of poor dear Theodore 

 Hook's at Fulham, look as if they might be kept 

 in order with a pair of scissors and a toothpick ; 

 but I saw those welcome heralds of spring, decked 

 with their glowing tabards as early as the 2nd of 

 that month some few years since. 



The Frost-genius takes his opportunities of 

 convincing mortals that his reign has not passed 

 away, by a demonstration of more than ordinary 

 severity, as he did in 1783-4, when Paris espec- 

 ially was frozen to her very marrow, and the 

 greatest distress prevailed ; nor did the thaw per- 

 manently tafce place till late in February. Louis 

 XVI. and Marie Antoinette put forth all their 

 benevolent powers to relieve the pinching misery 

 of that icy grasp, and the blessings of the people 

 were inscribed on obelisks of snow as durable as 

 their gratitude. 



19th January. A genial afternoon, with a good 

 spice of an old May day in it, led me to the 

 Zoological Gardens, where a Tapir was lounging 

 about in the open air, as comfortable apparently as 

 if it had been in South America. Hippo very 

 much grown, and thriving admirably. His food 

 still oatmeal and milk, and it must be told as the 

 well-bred Hamet informed me in a whisper 

 " Many horse-dung ;" of which latter condiment 

 he consumes a great deal, and has long done so. 

 This reminded me of a passage in Sparrman, in 

 which he anticipates the possibility of bringing 

 one of these animals to Europe. Speaking of the 

 sucking hippopotamus which he captured and dis- 

 sected, the Swedish doctor says, " I am apt to sup- 

 pose that one a little older than this would not be 

 very nice in its food ; as that which we caught 

 was induced by hunger, as soon as it was let loose 

 near the wagon, to put up with something not 

 extremely delicate, which had been just dropped 

 from one of our oxen." 



It is not at all improbable that the animal took 

 this, not from pressure of hunger, but as a cor- 

 rective to the milk, the curd of which was found 

 in its stomach ; and it is possible, that the suck- 

 ing hippopotamus, in a state of nature, may have 

 recourse to the droppings of the parent for that 

 purpose. This does not seem to have occurred to 

 Sparrman, who, after relating his anecdote, 

 observes, that this may appear very extraordinary 

 in an animal with four stomachs ; but there have 

 been instances of this kind known in common cat- 

 tle, which in Herjedal, are partly fed with horse- 

 dung. He states, that he has been assured, that 

 this method of feeding cattle has been practised 

 with great advantage in Upland when there has 



