538 NATURAL HISTORY 



As I perceive you loved the good old man, I do not know 

 how I can amuse you better, than by sending you the fol- 

 lowing anecdotes respecting him, some of which may not 

 have fallen within your observation. 1 His attention to the 

 inside of ladies' tea-kettles, to observe how far they were 

 incrusted with stone (tophus lebetinus Linnaei) that from 

 thence he might judge of the salubrity of the water of their 

 wells : his advising water to be showered down suspicious 

 wells from the nozle of a garden watering-pot in order to 

 discharge damps, before men ventured to descend ; his 

 directing air-holes to be left in the out-walls of ground 

 rooms, to prevent the rotting of floors and joists; his 

 earnest dissuasive to young people, not to drink their tea 

 scalding hot ; his advice to watermen at a ferry, how they 

 might best preserve and keep sound the bottoms or floors 

 of their boats; his teaching the housewife to place an 

 inverted tea- cup at the bottom of her pies and tarts to pre- 

 vent the syrop from boiling over, and to preserve the juice ; 

 his many though unsuccessful attempts to find an ade- 

 quate succedaneum for yeast or barm, so difficult to be 

 procured in severe winters, and in many lonely situations ; 

 his endeavour to destroy insects on wall-fruit-trees by 

 quick-silver poured into holes bored in their stems ; and his 

 experiments to dissolve the stone in human bodies, by, as 

 I think, the juice of onions ; are a few, among many, of 

 those benevolent and useful pursuits on which his mind was 

 constantly bent. Though a man of a Baronet's family, and 

 of one of the best houses in Kent, 2 yet was his humility so 

 prevalent, that he did not disdain the lowest offices, pro- 

 vided they tended to the good of his fellow creatures. The 

 last act of benevolence in which I saw him employed was, 

 at his rectory of Faringdon, the next parish to this, where 

 I found him in the street with his paint-pot before him, and 



1 An extract from Hales's " Haemastatics " (p. 360) will be found 

 embodied by White in note to his Sixth Letter to Pennant (p. 18). 

 ED. 



2 See note 1 to the first letter in the present series. ED. 



