TRUFFLES. 301 
and are now grown to a considerable height. As the Ewel was 
in beans last summer, it is most likely that these seeds came 
from thence ; "but then the distance is too considerable for them 
to have been conveyed by mice. It is most probable therefore 
that they were brought by birds, and in particular by jays and 
pies, who seem to have hid them among the grass and moss, and 
then to have forgotten where they had stowed them.* Some peas 
are growing also in the same situation, and probably under the 
same circumstances. 
CUCUMBERS SET BY BEES. 
If bees, who are much the best setters of cucumbers, do not 
happen to take kindly to the frames, the best way is to tempt 
them by a little honey put on the male and female bloom. When 
they are once induced to haunt the frames, they set all the fruit, 
and will hover with impatience round the lights in a morning, 
till the glasses are opened. Probatum est. 
WHEAT. 
A NOTION has aWays obtained, that in England hot summers 
are productive of fine crops of wheat; yet in the years 1780 and 
1781, though the heat was intense, the wheat was much mil- 
dewed, and the crop light. Does not severe heat, while the straw 
is milky, occasion its juices to exude, which being extrarasated, 
occasion spots, discolour the stems and blades, and injure the 
health of the plants ? « 
TRUFFLES. 
August. A truffle-hunter called on us, having in his pocket 
several large truffles found in this neighbourhood. He says these 
roots are not to be found in deep woods, but in narrow hedge- 
rows and the skirts of coppices. f Some truffles, he informed us, 
lie two feet within the earth, and some quite on the surface ; the 
latter, he added, have little or no smell, and are not so easily 
* These birds are in the continual habit of thus sowing beans, acorns, and the like, so that 
many lofty monarchs of the forest may have originated through their agency. The commoa 
squirrel does the same. — Ed. 
t *' Roots" is rather a faulty term by which to distinguish these curious vegetable productions 
which are a species of underground fungus. — E©. 
