NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 157 



met with your approbation. My remarks are the result of 

 many years' observation ; and are, I trust, true in the whole, 

 though I do not pretend to say that they are perfectly void 

 of mistake, or that a more nice observer might not 

 make many additions, since subjects of this kind are 

 inexhaustible. 



If you think my letter worthy the notice of your respect- 

 able society, you are at liberty to lay it before them ; and 

 they will consider it, I hope, as it was intended, as a 

 humble attempt to promote a more minute inquiry into 

 natural history ; into the life and conversation of animals. 

 Perhaps, hereafter, I may be induced to take the house- 

 swallow under consideration ; and from that proceed to the 

 rest of the British hirundines. 



Though I have now travelled the Sussex Downs upwards 

 of thirty years, yet I still investigate that chain of majestic 

 mountains with fresh admiration year by year ; and I think 

 I see new beauties every time I traverse it. This range, 

 which runs from Chichester eastward as far as Eastbourne, 

 is about sixty miles in length, and is called the South 

 Downs, properly speaking, only round Lewes. As you 

 •pass along you command a noble view of the wild, or weald, 

 on one hand, and the broad downs and sea on the other. 

 Mr. Ray used to visit a family just at the foot of these 

 hills, and was so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton 

 Plain, near Lewes, that he mentions those scapes in his 

 Wisdom of God in the Works of Creation with the utmost 

 satisfaction, and thinks them equal to anything he had 

 seen in the finest parts of Europe. 



For my own part, I think there is somewhat peculiarly 

 sweet and amusing in the shapely-figured aspect of chalk- 

 hills in preference to those of stone, which are rugged, 

 broken, abrupt, and shapeless. 



