House-martins ate distinguished from that congeners by having that legs coveted with soft downy feathers down to their toes. They are no songsters, but twitter in a pretty inward soft manner in their nests. During the time of breeding they are often greatly molested with fleas.
I am, etc.
Letter XVII
To The Honourable Daines Barrington
Ringmer, near Lewes, Dec. 9, 1773.
Dear Sir,
I received your last favour just as I was setting out for this place; and am pleased to find that my monography met with your approbation. My remarks are the result of many years’ observation; and are, I trust, true on the whole: though I do not pretend to say that they are perfectly void of mistake, or that a more nice observer ought not make many additions, since subjects of this kind are inexhaustible.
If you think my letter worthy the notice of your respectable society, you are at liberty to lay it before them; and they win consider it, I hope, as it was intended, as an humble attempt to promote a more minute inquiry into natural history; into the life and conversation of animals. Perhaps hereafter I may be induced to take the house-swallow under consideration, and from that proceed to the rest of the British hirundines.
Though I have now travelled the Sussex-downs upwards of thirty years, yet I still investigate that chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year by year; and think I see new beauties every time I traverse it. This range, which runs from Chichester eastward as far as East-Bourn, is about sixty miles in length, and is called the South Downs, properly speaking, only round Lewes. As you pass along you command a noble view of the wild, or weald, on one hand, and the broad downs and sea on the other. Mr. Ray used to visit a family* just at the foot of these hips, and was so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton-plain near Lewes, that he mentions those scopes in his Wisdom of God in the Works of the Creation with the utmost satisfaction, and thinks them equal to anything he had seen in the finest parts of Europe.
* Mr. Courthope, of Danny.