16 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



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. 1 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. 



1 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 mani- 

 fest, from this observation, viz. Nov. 29, 1731, a little snow having 

 fallen 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 more than four feet 

 depth of earth over it. It continued also to lie on thatch, tiles, and the 

 tops of walls." See Hales's Haemastatics, 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 ? 



