638 
NATURAL EI8T0BT 
As I perceive you loved tlie 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/ His attention to the 
inside of ladies' tea-kettles, to observe how far they were 
incrusted with stone {tophus lebetinns Linnsei) 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 difiicult 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,'^ 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 
' An extract from Hales's " Hasmastatics " (p. 360) will be found 
embodied by White in note to his Sixth Letter to Pennant (p. 18). 
—Ed. 
^ See note 1 to the first letter in the present series. — Ed. 
