Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/203

Rh We have had a very wet autumn and winter, so as to raise the springs to a pitch beyond anything since 1764; which was a remarkable year for floods and high waters. The land-springs which we call lavants, break out much on the downs of Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire. The country people say when the lavants rise corn will always be dear; meaning that when the earth is so glutted with water as to send forth springs on the downs and uplands, that the corn-vales must be drowned; and so it has proved for these ten or eleven years past. For land-springs have never obtained more since the memory of man than during that period; nor has there been known a greater scarcity of all sorts of grain, considering the great improvements of modern husbandry. Such a run of wet seasons a century or two ago would, I am persuaded, have occasioned a famine. Therefore pamphlets and newspaper letters, that talk of combinations, tend to inflame and mislead; since we must not expect plenty till Providence sends us more favourable seasons. The wheat of last year, all round this district, and in the county of Rutland, and elsewhere, yields remarkably bad; and our wheat on the ground, by the continual late sudden vicissitudes from fierce frost to pouring rains, looks poorly and the turnips rot very fast. I am, etc.

LETTER XX. , Feb. 26th, 1774 ,—The sand-martin, or bank-martin, is by much the least of any of the British hirundines; and as far as we have ever