24} NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
Bentley and Kingsley, assert that it belongs to them ; and, as- 
sembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away. 
One man, who keeps a team, has carried home, for his share, forty 
stacks of wood. Forty-five of these people his Lordship has served 
with actions. These trees, which were very sound, and in high 
perfection, were vs^inter-cut, viz. in February and March, before 
the bark would run. In old times the Holt was estimated to be 
eighteen miles, computed measure, from water-carriage, viz. from 
the town of Chertsey, on the Thames ; but now it is not half 
the distance, since the Wey is made navigable up to the town of 
Godalming in the county of Surrey. 
LETTER X. To T. PENNANT, Esq. 
August 4, 1767 
It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours 
whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural 
knowledge ; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my in- 
dustry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender pro- 
gress in a kind of information to which I have been attached 
from my childhood. 
As to swallows, hirundines rusticce, being found in a torpid 
state during the winter in the Isle of Wight, or any part of this 
country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. 
But a clergyman, of an inquisitive turn, assures me that, when 
he was a great boy, some workmen, in pulling down the battle- 
ments of a church tower early in the spring, found two or three 
swifts (hirundines apodes)* among the rubbish, which were, at 
first appearance, dead ; but, on being carried towards the fire, re- 
vived. He told me that, out of his great care to preserve them, 
he put them in a paper bag, and hung them by the kitchen fire, 
where they were suflfocated. 
Another intelligent person has informed me that, while he was 
a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great fragment of 
the chalk-clifF fell down one stormy winter on the beach, and 
that many people found swallows among the rubbish ; but, on 
* O/pseltis murarius of moflern naturalists. — Ed. 
