LAND SPRINGS SWALLOWS. 157 



^Eneas. The verb sonat, also, seems to imply a bird that is 

 somewhat loquacious.* 



We have had a very wet autumn and winter, so as to raise 

 the springs to a pitch beyond any thing since 1764, which was 

 a remarkable year for floods and high waters. The land- 

 springs, which we call levants, break out much on the downs 

 of Sussex, Hampshire, and Wiltshire. The country people 

 say, when the levants rise, corn will always be dear ; meaning, 

 that when the earth is so glutted with water as to send forth 

 springs on the downs and uplands, that the com vales must be 

 drowned : and so it has proved for these ten or eleven years 

 past ; for land-springs have never obtained more since the 

 memory of man than during that period, nor has there been 

 known a greater scarcity of all sorts of grain, considering the 

 great improvements of modem husbandry. Such a run of wet 

 seasons, a century or two ago, would, I am persuaded, have 

 occasioned a famine. Therefore, pamphlets and newspaper 

 letters that talk of combinations, tend to inflame and mislead, 

 since we must not expect plenty till Providence sends us more 

 favourable seasons. 



The wheat of last year, all round this district, and in the 

 county of Rutland, and elsewhere, yields remarkably bad ; and 

 our wheat on the ground, by the continual late sudden vicissi- 

 tudes from fierce frost to pouring rains, looks poorly, and the 

 turnips rot very fast. 



LETTER LIX. 



TO THE HON. DAINES BARRINGTON. 



SELBORNE, February 26, 1774. 



DEAR SIR, The sand-marten, or bank-marten, is by much 

 the. least of any of the British hirundines, and, as far as we have 

 ever seen, the smallest known hirundo; though Brisson asserts 

 that there is one much smaller, and that is the hirundo escu/enta,-\- 



* Nigra velut magnas domini cum divitis sedes 

 Pervolat, et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo, 

 Pabula parva legens, nidisque loquacibus escas : 

 Et nunc porticibus vacuis, iiunc huraida cireum 

 Stagna sonat. 



f The edible nest of this species constitutes one of the luxuries of an 

 Indian banquet. The Nicobar swallow builds in fissures and cavities of 

 rocks, especially such as are open to the south. In the latter situation, the 

 finest and whitest nests are found. Sometimes fifty pounds weight of 

 them are gathered in a nest-hunting excursion. They are small, and 



