EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; 235 
must be admitted that Dr. Hill was not a very trustworthy 
observer. * 
The Cressi heronry, which Pennant saw, and which is 
‘also alluded to in the “ British Zoology,’ must have been 
an exceptionally fine one. Pennant did not fail to transmit 
some account of it to Gilbert White, but that is lost, although 
we have White’s characteristic reply.{ It was situated near 
the town of Gosberton, not far from Sir Joseph Banks’s Abbey 
at Revesby, where Pennant, on his first visit to Lincolnshire 
in May, 1768, had been fortunate enough to shoot the Sedge 
Warbler.§ 
On less competent authority so many as eighty nests on 
one oak tree would hardly have been accepted as credible, 
nor has Pennant’s counting met with a modern parallel in 
England. Lincolnshire heronries appear to have been larger 
than at the present day, but it is hardly likely that the birds 
themselves were more numerous. Pishey Thompson, a local 
historian, writes of a very large tree at Leake, in the same 
neighbourhood, which was literally covered with Herons’ 
nests,|| but he does not tell us how many, or whether anybody 
counted them. 
ors History of Animals,” by John Hill, forming Vol. III. of a general 
Natural History. 
y IL, p. 422. 
+t Letters to Pennant, XXII, XXIII. 
§ Thereby adding a bird to the British list, see White’s letter XXIV. 
| ‘‘ Boston and The Hundred of Skirbeck,” 1820, p. 368. Dawson 
Rowley says that the tree at Leake was an ash, and that it was still 
standing in 1822 (‘‘ Orn. Misc., III., p. 71). 
