153 
just, & the assertion no inconsiderable compliment: for un- 
doubtedly speculative enquiries can bear no competition with 
practical ones, where the latter profess never to lose sight of 
utility. 
As I perceive You loved the good old man, I do not know how 
I can amuse You better, than by sending you the following anec- 
dotes respecting him, some of which may not have fallen within 
your observation . 2 His attention to the inside of Ladies tea- 
kettles, to observe how far they were incrusted with stone ( tophus 
lebetinns Linnaei) that from thence he might judge of the salu- 
brity of the water of' their wells : — his advising water to be 
showered down suspicious wells from the nozle of a garden water- 
ing-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 & joists ; — his 
earnest dissuasive to young people, not to drink their tea scalding 
hot ; his advice to water-men at a ferry, how they might best 
preserve & kenp sound the bottoms or floors of their boats ; — his 
teaching the house-wife to place an inverted tea-cup at the bottom 
of her pies & tarts to prevent the syrop from boiling over, & 
to preserve the juice; — his many tho’ unsuccessful attempts to 
find an adequate succedaneum for yeast or barm, so difficult to be 
procured in severe winters, & in man}- lonely situations ; — his 
endeavour to destroy insects on wall-fruit-trees by quick-silver 
poured into holes bored in their stems; — & 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, & useful 
pursuits on which his mind was constantly bent. Tho’ a man of 
a Baronet’s family, & of one of the best houses in Kent, s yet was 
his Humility so prevalent, that he did not disdain the lowest 
offices, provided 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, tho next parish to this, where I found 
him in the street with his paint-pot before him, & much busied 
in painting white with his own hands the tops of the foot-path 
* An extract from Hales’s ‘ Haemostatics’ (p. 360) will be found embodied 
by White in a note to his Sixth Letter to Pennant.— J.E.H. 
3 Sec note 1 to the first letter in the present series. — J.E. n. 
