OF SELBORNE 221 



to the left, they pervaded the vale above Combrvood-ponds ; and 

 after a pause seemed to take up the crash again, and to extend 

 round Harteley- 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 

 therefore 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 again twice 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 Weybridge, 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. 1 



I am, &c. 



1 [I find by means of a good aneroid barometer that the highest part of Selborne 

 Hill is nearly or quite 300 feet above the house at Selborne ; and Newton Vicarage, 

 on the same hill, is not far from that elevation. The barometer fitted by Gilbert 

 White himself, and doubtless the one to which he alludes in this letter, is stiU in 

 the old place, fixed at the end of his own bookcase ; and what is worthy of notice, 

 besides the graduation marked on the tube itself, there is by its side a small ivory 

 plate, graduated nearly '3 of an inch lower than the Selborne reading, and which 



