io8 
NATURE NOTES. 
Downs begin, stretching away towards Winchester and the 
South ; and it is to its situation at the base of the chalk that 
Selborne owes its great natural beauty and diversity of scenery. 
The water, sinking through the porous rock of the hill, is 
arrested by the impervious marls which crop out just above the 
village, and breaks forth in the two streams before mentioned, 
which have carved out the romantic valley of the infant Wey. 
Here the rugged banks, unfit for pasture or the plough, are left 
to support the flora and fauna of the neighbourhood and to 
delight for ever the lover of wild nature. 
From the summit of the Hanger to Wolmer Pond we pass 
through the chalk to the chalk marls ; the village itself is built 
on the upper greensand ; and towards the foot of the mound on 
which stands the Church, the gault clay appears, while further 
down the stream we reach the lower greensand of the Forest. 
Thus the surface-waters everywhere, coursing for ages over 
strata varying so much in hardness and solubility, have worn 
the ground unevenly, forming slopes and ledges, bank and 
knolls, in a most pleasing variety. “ The parish I live in,” 
says Gilbert White, “is a very abrupt uneven country, and 
therefore full of birds. In a district so diversified as this with 
such a variety of hill and dale aspects and soils, it is no wonder 
that great choice of plants should be found. Chalks, clays, 
sands, sheep-walks, downs, bogs, heaths, woodlands and cham- 
pain-fields cannot fail but furnish an ample flora.” Selborne 
is now, as it was a hundred 5’ears ago, a very paradise for a 
naturalist, and especially for an ornithologist. The study of 
birds was White’s chief love, and here his industry found ample 
scope. 
The surrounding agriculture is also favourable to natural 
history, for it must not be supposed that Selborne is entirely 
given over to wild nature. The chalk marls, the “ white malm ” 
of the Natural History, are good corn land, and form the “ fair 
enclosures to the north-west, north and east of the village.” 
Again, the soil where chalk and greensand meet is proverbially 
rich ; this is the “ black malm — the warm forward crumbling 
mould ” of the gardens and orchards, which the cart-way of the 
village divides from the stiffer ground above. There can be 
little doubt that in a country like this the occupation of man, 
and his tillage of such soil as will repay his care, does on the 
whole favour the existence of birds and small animals. The 
ploughing land and the pastures, the meadows with their seeding 
grasses, afford them abundant and varied food ; the herds of 
cattle and sheep enrich the soil and increase the supply of 
worms and insects ; the cornfields, the orchards, the stubbles 
and fallows, the sunny hedge-rows with their ditches and 
mounds, the very weeds of arable ground and of wayside wastes, 
the thistle, groundsel, chickweed, charlock and plantain, all 
profuse seed-bearers, each in their turn provide a rich harvest 
for the fowls of the air and for the small beasts of the wood and 
