24 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



Bentley and Kingsley, assert that it belongs to them ; and, as- 

 sembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away. 

 One man, who keeps a team has carried home, for his share, forty 

 stacks of wood. Forty-five of these people his Lordship has served 

 with actions. These trees, which were very sound, and in high 

 perfection, were winter-cut, viz. in February and March, before 

 the bark would run. In old times the Holt was estimated to be 

 eighteen miles, computed measure, from water-carriage, viz. from 

 the town of Chertsey, on the Thames ; but now it is not half 

 the distance, since the Wey is made navigable up to the town of 

 Godalming in the county of Surrey, 



LETTER X. To T. PENNANT, ESQ. 



August 4, 1767- 



IT has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours 

 whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural 

 knowledge ; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my in- 

 dustry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender pro- 

 gress in a kind of information to which I have been attached 

 from my childhood. 



As to swallows, hirundines rustica, being found in a torpid 

 state during the winter in the Isle of Wight, or any part of this 

 country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. 

 But a clergyman, of an inquisitive turn, assures me that, when 

 he was a great boy, some workmen, in pulling down the battle- 

 ments of a church tower early in the spring, found two or three 

 swifts (hirundines apodes)* among the rubbish, which were, at 

 first appearance, dead ; but, on being carried towards the'fire, re- 

 vived. He told me that, out of his great care to preserve them, 

 he put them in a paper bag, and hung them by the kitchen fire, 

 where they were suffocated. 



Another intelligent person has informed me that, while he was 

 a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great fragment of 

 the chalk-cliff fell down one stormy winter on the beach, and 

 that many people found swallows among the rubbish ; but, on 



* Cypselus murarius of modern naturalists. En. 



