steady and attentive look; but, if he approach, her note becomes earnest and alarming, and her outcries are redoubled. No inhabitants of a yard seem possessed of such a variety of expression, and so copious a language, as common poultry. Take a chicken of four or five days old, and hold it up to a window where there are flies, and it will immediately seize its prey with little twitterings of complacency; but if you tender it a wasp or a bee, at once its note becomes harsh, and expressive of disapprobation and a sense of danger. When a pullet is ready to lay, she intimates the event by a joyous and easy soft note. Of all the occurrences of their life, that of laying seems to be the most important; for no sooner has a hen disburdened herself, than she rushes forth with a clamorous kind of joy, which the cock and the rest of his mistresses immediately adopt. The tumult is not confined to the family concerned, but catches from yard to yard, and spreads to every homestead within hearing, till at last the whole village is in an uproar. As soon as a hen becomes a mother, her new relation demands a new language; she then runs clucking and screaming about, and seems agitated as if possessed. The father of the flock has also a considerable vocabulary: if he finds food, he calls a favourite concubine to partake; and if a bird of prey passes over, with a warning voice, he bids his family beware. The gallant chanticleer has, at command, his amorous phrases, and his terms of defiance. But the sound by which he is best known is his crowing: by this he has been distinguished in all ages as the countryman's clock or larum, as the watchman that proclaims the divisions of the night. Thus the poet elegantly styles him the crested cock, whose clarion sounds The silent hours. A neighbouring gentleman, one summer, had lost most of his chickens by a sparrow-hawk, that came gliding down, between a fagot pile and the end of his house, to the place where the coops stood. The owner, inwardly vexed to see his flock thus diminishing, hung a setting net adroitly between the pile and the house, into which the caitiff dashed, and was entangled. Resentment suggested the law of retaliation; he, therefore, clipped the hawk's wings, cut off his talons, and, fixing a cork on his bill, threw him down among the broodhens. Imagination cannot paint the scene that ensued; the expressions that fear, rage, and revenge inspired, were new, or at least such as had been unnoticed before. The exasperated matrons upbraided · -they execrated—they insulted-they triumphed. In a word, they never desisted from buffeting their adversary till they had torn him in a hundred pieces. LETTER LXXXVI. TO THE HON. DAINES BARRINGTON. monstrent Quid tantùm Oceano properent se tingere soles SELBORNE. GENTLEMEN who have outlets might contrive to make ornament subservient to utility; a pleasing eye-trap might also contribute to promote science: an obelisk in a garden or park might be both an embellishment and a heliotrope. Any person that is curious, and enjoys the advantage of a good horizon, might, with little trouble, make two heliotropes, the one for the winter, the other for the summer solstice; and these two erections might be constructed with very little expense; for two pieces of timber frame-work, about ten or twelve feet high, and four feet broad at the base, and close lined with plank, would answer the purpose. The erection for the former should, if possible, be placed within sight of some window in the common sitting parlour; because men, at that dead season of the year, are usually within doors at the close of the day; while that for the latter might be fixed for any given spot in the garden or outlet, whence the owner might contemplate, in a fine summer's evening, the utmost extent that the sun makes to the northward at the season of the longest days. Now nothing would be necessary but to place these two objects with so much exactness, that the westerly limb of the sun, at setting, might but just clear the winter heliotrope to the west of it, on the shortest day, and that the whole disc of the sun, at the longest day, might exactly, at setting, also clear the summer heliotrope to the north of it.* * Mr Mark Watt has invented a very curious and interesting instrument, which he calls the heliastron, or solar compass. Having observed the daily variation of barometers and the magnetic needle, and remarking that a similar series of alternate changes were more or less observable in every instrument capable of indicating a slight a'teration of the impressions made on them, and that these diurnal changes bore a proportionate By this simple expedient, it would soon appear, that there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a solstice; for, from the shortest day, the owner would, every clear evening, see the disc advancing, at its setting, to the westward of the object; and, from the ongest day, observe the sun retiring backwards every evening, at its setting, towards the object westward, till, in a few nights, it would set quite behind it, and so by degrees to the west of it; for when the sun comes near the summer solstice, the whole disc of it would at first set behind the object: after a time, the northern limb would first appear, and so every night gradually more, till at length the whole diameter would set northward of it for about three nights; but, on the middle night of the three, sensibly more remote than the former or following. When beginning its recess from the summer tropic, it would continue more and more to be hidden every night, till at length it would descend quite behind the object again; and so nightly more and more to the westward. relation to the latitude in which the instruments were placed, or to the degrees of solar influence that might exist in the regions in which they were used, and of which they would partake; he also noticed, in coincidence with these movements, the daily expansion and contraction of the petals and leaves of most plants, and that the different species of the heliotropium and chrysanthemum, turned their corollæ round toward the sun for many hours during the day. Hence he concluded that an instrument might be constructed upon principles nearly similar to the laws which regulate these motions in plants. This instrument he formed of a circular ring of cork, three inches in diameter. Into this is fixed twenty-five needles fully impregnated with the magnetic fluid, and these are placed at equal distances round the circumference of the circle, with their north and south poles placed outwards alternately. This circle is affixed to a light slip of wood, five inches long, and one-fourth of an inch broad, by a piece of copper wire, of a semicircular form, the extremities of which are passed through the opposite sides of the cork's circle; and the slip of wood attached to the centre of the wire. Into the centre of the bar is fixed an agate cup; and the whole traverses like a compass needle upon a fine steel point, the bar of wood being equipoised by a small weight at the end of it, equivalent to the weight of the needles. This instrument, when placed with a disc of purple velvet across the needles, in the sun's rays, continued to revolve nearly the whole day, moving always in the direction from east to west by south, in the course of the sun's apparent motion. It moves forty or fifty degrees to the light of a single candle held close to the side of the circle. A piece of clear amber, formed into a convex lens, if fixed into a circle of cork, and suspended by a fine hair or filament, under a glass cover, will also be arrested by the incidence of the solar rays, and will continue to present its surface to the sun, if unclouded, as long as he is invisible above the horizon. It is, perhaps, not generally known, that the conducting power of living plants, in favouring the rapid distribution of electricity, has been reckoned three millions of times greater than that of water. -ED. LETTER LXXXVII. TO THE HON. DAINES BARRINGTON. SELBORNE. Mugire videbis Sub pedibus terram, et descendere montibus ornos. WHEN I was a boy, I used to read, with astonishment and implicit assent, accounts in Baker's Chronicle of walking hills and travelling mountains. John Philips, in his Cyder, alludes to the credit that was given to such stories with a delicate but quaint vein of humour, peculiar to the author of the Splendid Shilling: I nor advise, nor reprehend, the choice Of Marcley Hill; the apple no where finds Deceitful ground: who knows but that, once more, But, when I came to consider better, I began to suspect that, though our hills may never have journeyed far, yet that the ends of many of them have slipped and fallen away at distant periods, leaving the cliffs bare and abrupt. This seems to have been the case with Nore and Whetham Hills, and especially with the ridge between Harteley Park and Wardle-ham, where the ground has slid into vast swellings and furrows, and lies still in such romantic confusion as cannot be accounted for from any other cause. A strange event, that happened not long since, justifies our suspicions ; which, though it befell not within the limits of this parish, yet as it was within the hundred of Selborne, and as the circumstances were singular, may fairly claim a place in a work of this nature. * Marcley Hill is near the confluence of the Lug and Wye, about six miles east of Hereford. In the year 1595, it was, after roaring and shaking in a terrible manner for three days together, about six o'clock on Sunday evening, put in motion, and continued moving for eight hours, in which time it advanced upwards of two hundred feet from its first situation, and mounted twelve fathoms higher than it was before. In the place where it set out, it left a gap four hundred feet long, and three hundred and twenty broad; and in its progress it overthrew a chapel, together with trees and houses that stood in its way. - ED. The months of January and February in the year 1774, were remarkable for great melting snows and vast gluts of rain, so that, by the end of the latter month, the land-springs, or levants, began to prevail, and to be near as high as in the memorable winter of 1764. The beginning of March also went on in the same tenor, when, in the night between the 8th and 9th of that month, a considerable part of the great woody hanger at Hawkley was torn from its place, and fell down, leaving a high freestone cliff naked and bare, and resembling the steep side of a chalk-pit. It appears that this huge fragment, being, perhaps, sapped and undermined by waters, foundered, and was ingulfed, going down in a perpendicular direction; for a gate, which stood in the field on the top of the hill, after sinking with its posts for thirty or forty feet, remained in so true and upright a position, as to open and shut with great exactness, just as in its first situation. Several oaks also are still standing, and in a state of vegetation, after taking the same desperate leap. That great part of this prodigious mass was absorbed in some gulf below, is plain also from the inclining ground at the bottom of the hill, which is free and unencumbered, but would have been buried in heaps of rubbish, had the fragment parted and fallen forward. About an hundred yards from the foot of this hanging coppice stood a cottage by the side of a lane; and two hundred yards lower, on the other side of the lane, was a farm-house, in which lived a labourer and his family; and just by, a stout new barn. The cottage was inhabited by an old woman and her son, and his wife. These people, in the evening, which was very dark and tempestuous, observed that the brick floors of their kitchens began to heave and part, and that the walls seemed to open, and the roofs to crack; but they all agree that no tremor of the ground, indicating an earthquake, was ever felt, only that the wind continued to make a most tre mendous roaring in the woods and hangers. The miserable inhabitants, not daring to go to bed, remained in the utmost solicitude and confusion, expecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of their shattered edifices. When daylight came, they were at leisure to contemplate the devastations of the night. They then found that a deep rift, or chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them, as it were, in two, and that one end of the barn had suffered in a similar manner : that a pond near the cottage had undergone a strange reverse, becoming deep at the shallow end, and so vice versa: that many large oaks were removed out of their perpendicular, |