i8 The Natural History 



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 exam- 

 ined, that none has been found of late.^ 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 ^vithin 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. 



^ 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 sur- 

 rounding 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 pro- 

 moting a thaw, as well as the change of the weather from a freezing 

 to a thawing state, is manifest, from this observation, viz., Nov. 29, 

 1 73 1, 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 Hesmasia/us, p. 360. Quare. — 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 ? 



