November 28.] 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
WEEKLY CALENDAR. 
121 
M W 
I) D 
• NOV. 28—DEC. 4, 1850. 
Weather near London in 1849. 
Sun 
Sun 
Moon 
Moon’s 
Clock 
Day of 
1 Barometer. 
Thermo. 
Wind. 
Rain in In. 
Rises. 
Sets. 
R.&S. 
Age. 
bef. Sun. 
\ ear. 
28 Th 
29 F 
20 S 
1 Sun 1 
1 2M_ 
1 3Tc 
1 4 W 
Elm stript. 
Thrush resumes song. 
St. Andrew. 
Advent Sunday. Trees all stript. 
Linmean Society. Horticultural Soc. 
30.051—29.9« 
29.973 — 29.932 
29.894 — 29.786 
30.116 — 29.934 
29.821—29.419 
29.521 — 29.415 
29.542-29.520 
33—21 
45—31 
48—28 
48—29 
50—40 
40—31 
39—19 
W. 
s. 
s.w. 
w. 
s. 
N.E. 
s. 
0.16 
0.23 
0.12 
0.46 
0.06 
41 a. 7 
43 
44 
46 
47 
49 
50 
55 a. 3 
54 
53 
52 
52 
51 
51 
0 57 
2 13 
3 28 
4 42 
5 55 
sets. 
4 a.50 
24 
25 
26 
27 
28 
@ 
11 52 
11 31 
11 9 
10 47 
10 24 
10 0 
9 36 
332 
333 
334 
335 
336 
337 
338 
It has been said that no book was ever published from which some 
useful information could not be gained, and it is at least equally true 
that no man ever lived from whose biography no useful lesson could be 
deduced. In some form or other every mortal offers us an example of 
excellence to be imitated, or of vice or slothfulness to be avoided. Sir 
John Hill affords us many of these lessons; for whilst we must hold 
up most of the prominent passages of his life to our readers, as warnings 
from pursuing a similar course, yet no one can avoid observing in him a 
proof of the achievements possible to unwearied industry and rigid 
economy of time. He was born about 1 716 ,—the son of a Lincolnshire 
clergyman ; was educated to earn a living as an apothecary; and his 
failures, even from honesty, were thus touched upon by Mr. Woodward, 
whom he had wantonly attacked. “ I do remember,” says Mr. Wood¬ 
ward, “ an apothecary, who whilom did reside in a small shop, or rather 
shed, in St. Martin’s Lane; whilom in a smaller at Westminster; who 
whilom did remove from thence to the Savoy; and whilom did remove 
thence into the country, ‘culling of simples ; ’ and who afterwards did make 
such a cull of the master of Chelsea Gardens, and did so cull in these 
gardens, that he never could get himself into them more, and, which is 
worse, could never get his name out of the books belonging to the same.” 
Without patrimony, wedded to a woman without a dowry, and unsuc¬ 
cessful in business, Mr. Hill’s spirit remained unsubdued, and he strove 
to turn his botanical knowledge to his pecuniary advantage. I 11 this he 
succeeded, for the Duke of Richmond and Lord Petre employed him to 
arrange and superintend their Botanic Gardens, and to search the British 
Islands for new plants. His researches were great, and his industry 
unwearied; but the harvest was small, and his patrons fickle. He lost 
his appointments, and turned player; but he was not calculated for the 
stage, and he failed even in the appropriate part of the half-starved apo¬ 
thecary in Romeo and Juliet. He resumed the pestle and mortar, as 
well as his botanical inquiries ; wrote unsuccessful plays ; dispensed 
medicines at a military hospital; and translated Theophrastus On Gems : 
varied changes, which obtained for him the witty appellation of Harlequin 
Hill. “ There is a tide in the affairs of men,” and Mr. Hill took advan¬ 
tage of the rise in his, consequent on the publication of his translation. 
It was well executed, and procured him friends, reputation, and money. 
Encouraged by this success, says one of his biographers, he engaged in 
works of greater extent and importance. A General Natural History, 
A Supplement to Chambers' Dictionary, and The British Magazine 
were only three of many works in which he at once engaged—works 
which seemed to require a man’s whole attention, yet he carried on at the 
same time a daily essay under the title of The Inspector. Notwith¬ 
standing all this employment, he was a constant attendant upon every 
place of public amusement—thus combining business with pleasure ; for 
he here collected wholesale the anecdotes and scandals which he retailed 
in his periodical literature. We must now speak of him as Dr. Hill, for 
at St. Andrews he purchased a diploma in medicine, and with this handle 
to his name entered upon the life of a man of fashion. Equipaged, well 
dressed, and the invited by those who feared as well as by those who 
enjoyed his scandals, he was a wasp buzzing in all gaieties, but whom no 
one could succeed in striking down. He could never be got into a law 
court. Unhappily, he who was humble when in poverty now proved that 
he was then humble only because he had nothing to sustain an exhibition 
of pride. Like frozen carrion brought into sunshine, he now became 
offensive to all. He who had been diffident was now self-sufficient ; and 
whilst his pompous vanity claimed more than ordinary homage, his 
vindictive spirit never allowed to pass unassailed any one who disputed 
his title to the tribute. Hence his writings abounded with scurrilities on 
the morals, understandings, and personal peculiarities of others ; and 
this unbridled license produced its almost invariable consequences : he 
was publicly caned; he was exposed in satire ; he was ridiculed for 
attacking the Ituyal Society, among whose members he had vainly sought 
to be enrolled ; and at length, like other lampooners, learning to prefer 
his worst joke before his best friend, he sank into the ingratitude of 
ridiculing the weaknesses of those who had borne him forward to 
affluence. The very Islnnael of literature, and borne down by the con¬ 
sequences of such malignity, and the town weary of such minglings of 
slander and baseness, he sank in estimation nearly as rapidly as he had 
risen. His works found no purchasers, and the booksellers ceased to be 
his bankers. But he was still “ Harlequin Hill; ” and his next change, 
equally successfully, was to the vocation of a Quack Doctor ! He was 
well learned in the weaknesses of human nature—he had lived richly 
upon its ill nature and its fear; and he now turned to its credulity, 
in approaching which the handle to his name was even more availing 
than previously. Doctor Hill’s “Essence of Water Dock,” Doctor 
Hill’s “ Pectoral Balsam of Honey,” and some other compounds, were 
professed to he the results of his botanic and chcmic skill, and that they 
were the spirit of simples which were beneficently stored around our very 
homes, wisely common because powerfully and universally healing. The 
public listened to the appeal, and the next step to listening is to buy. 
The sale of his panaceas was rapid, and once more the doctor lived in 
splendour. Among his dupc3 was no less a.personage than the Earl of 
Bute—the would-be Maecenas and Minister of England, and equally 
unfortunate in both. Dr. Hill under this patronage published a pompous 
System of Botany, in twenty-six folio volumes, presented a set to the 
King of Sweden, obtained in return a knighthood in the Order of the 
Polar Star, and just lived long enough to refute his own assertion, that 
his Tincture of Bardana was specific in the gout. He died of this 
disease at his residence in Bayswater, on the 22nd of November, in 1775. 
notice in our brief chronicle ; but there are many others in the catalogue 
of his works more than sufficient to establish his title, although we shall 
but mention his Eden, or a complete body of Gardening, and his Gar¬ 
dener's New Kalendar —folio volumes, expensive and worthless. It will 
be readily believed that a satirist so general in his flagellations had many 
a poignant scourging in return, and some of them are so racy that we 
must find for them lines of sufficient room. Sir John Hill had attacked 
David Garrick for confounding the letters I and U in some of his pro¬ 
nunciations, and this was Garrick’s return thrust: — 
“ If ’tis true, as you say, that I’ve injured a letter, 
I’ll change my notes soon, and I hope for the better ; 
May the just rights of letters, as well as of men, 
Hereafter be fixed by the tongue and the pen ! 
Most devoutly I wish that they both have their due, 
And that I may never be mistaken for U .” 
Sir John had attempted to write plays as well as to act them 
and this 
combination of the poet and physician was thus analyzed and estimated: 
“ For physic and farces his equal there scarce is,-— 
His farces are physic, and his physic a farce is.” 
Another critic epistolized him thus :— 
“ Thou essence of dock, valerian, and sage, 
At once the disgrace and the pest of this age, 
The worst that we wish thee, for all thy vile crimes, 
Is to take thy own physic, and read thy own rhymes.” 
To which another wit replied,— 
“ The wish must be in form revers’d 
To suit the doctor’s crimes ; 
For if he takes his physic first, 
He’ll never read his rhymes.” 
Meteorology of the Week. —At Chiswick, the observations of 
twenty-three years show the average highest and lowest temperatures of 
these davs to be 48.3° and 36.7°, respectively. The greatest heat, 60 °, 
was on the 28th of November, 1828 ; and the extreme cold, 16°, was on 
the 29th in 1846. On 79 days rain fell, and 82 days were fine. 
Insects. —One of the 
most injurious of these is 
the Tinea granella, the Corn 
Moth, or, as some call it 
most inappropriately, the 
Mottled Woollen Moth. Its 
larvae or grubs are very de¬ 
structive of all kinds of 
grain. For the following 
particulars we are indebted 
to M. Kbllar. 
When at rest, the wings of 
the moth are laid over each 
other sloping at the sides like a roof, with the posterior border somewhat 
projecting. The body is brown, mixed with a little white on the back. 
The head has a tuft of yellowish-white hairs. The eyes are black, and 
the anteniue are composed of many round joints, thread-shaped, and 
brown. The upper wings are of the same breadth throughout; white, 
spotted with dark brown and dusky dots. The brown spots often run 
into each other by means of the brown scales strewed between, and vary 
much in form and size in different individuals. The most certain mark is 
a spot of the same colour at the base, followed by an almost square spot 
on the outer or anterior border; behind this in a slanting direction runs 
a band-shaped spot almost through the whole breadth of the wings. 
Behind this are two dots on the anterior border, and immediately above 
the tips of the wings a larger brown spot. The posterior border is fur¬ 
nished with long brown-and-white mottled fringes. The under wings 
are smaller and shorter, brownish, and furnished with long -fringes at the 
posterior edge. The male and female are exactly alike in colour, but the 
latter has a thicker body. This moth appears in May, June, and July, in 
the buildings where grain is stored up ; it only flics about at night. 
Immediately after pairing, which usually takes place a few hours after the 
moth issues from the pupa, the female lays one or two yellowish-white 
oval eggs on single grains of corn. They can only be distinguished by a 
strong magnifying glass. A single female is capable of laying thirty 
eggs and upwards. She lays her eggs not only on grain laid up in store¬ 
houses, but even when it is still in sheaves in the field. After a few days, 
small white maggots proceed from the eggs, and immediately penetrate 
into the grain, carefully closing up the opening with their white roundish 
excrement, which they glue together by a fine web. When the single 
grain is no longer sufficient for their nourishment, the insects take 
another grain and unite it to the first by the same web, then add a third, 
fourth, and ultimately a great number together; the spaces between the 
single grains arc filled up with excrement. These larva} often leave this 
granular house, and run about over the corn, covering its whole surface 
so completely with a thick whitish-grey web, that scarcely a grain can be 
seen. In their fully grown condition the larvae are from five to six lines 
long; their bodies are composed of thirteen segments, and provided with 
eight pair of feet, only the three anterior pairs of which arc real feet, the 
others being wart-like appendages ^pro-logs) adapted for moving the 
body. The head is brownish-red; the body light ochre or buff; on the 
No. CXIII., Vol. V. 
