January 8th

1776 - Selborne, Hampshire
Selborne, Jan. 8,1776

IT is the hardest thing in the world to shake off superstitious prejudices: they are sucked in as it were with our mother's milk; and, growing up with us at a time when they take the fastest hold and make the most lasting impressions, become so interwoven into our very constitutions, that the strongest good sense is required to disengage ourselves from them. No wonder therefore that the lower people retain them their whole lives through, since their minds are not invigorated by a liberal education, and therefore not enabled to make any efforts adequate to the occasion.
Such a preamble seems to be necessary before we enter on the superstitions of this district, lest we should be suspected of exaggeration in a recital of practices too gross for this enlightened age.

But the people of Tring, in Hertfordshire, would do well to remember, that no longer ago than the year 1751, and within twenty miles of the capital, they seized on two superannuated wretches, crazed with age, and overwhelmed with infirmities, on a suspicion of witchcraft; and, by trying experiments, drowned them in a horse-pond.

Gilbert White
(Gilbert White (18 July 1720 – 26 June 1793) - letter to Daines Barrington. White was a pioneering naturalist and ornithologist, born in his grandfather's vicarage at Selborne in Hampshire. He is best known for his The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). )