SUMMERS or 1781 AND 1783. 299 



apricot in the south of Europe, where the heats were so g-jeat 

 as to render the juices vapid and insipid. 



The great pests of a garden are wasps, which destroy all 

 the finer fruits just as they are coming into perfection. In 

 1781, we had none ; in 1783, there were myriads, which 

 would have devoured all the produce of my garden, had we 

 not set the boys to take the nests, and caught thousands 

 with hazel-twigs tipped with bird-lime ; we have since 

 employed the boys to take and destroy the large breeding 

 wasps in spring. Such expedients have a great effect on 

 these marauders, and will keep them under. Though wasps 

 do not abound but in hot summers, yet they do not prevail 

 in every hot summer, as I have instanced in the two years 

 above mentioned. 



In the sultry season of 1783, honey-dews were so frequent 

 as to deface and destroy the beauties of my garden. My 

 honeysuckles, which were one week the most sweet and 

 lovely objects that eye could behold, became the next the 

 most loathsome, being enveloped in a viscous substance, and 

 loaded with black aphides, or smother-flies. The occasion of 

 this clammy appearance seems to be this, that in hot weather 

 the effluvia of flowers in fields, and meadows, and gardens, 

 are drawn up in the day by a brisk evaporation, and then in 

 the night fall down again with the dews in which they are 

 entangled; that the air is strongly scented, and therefore 

 impregnated with the particles of flowers in summer weather, 

 our senses will inform us ; and that this clammy sweet sub- 

 stance is of th.e vegetable kind we may learn from bees, to 

 whom it is very grateful ; and we may be assured that it 

 falls in the night, because it is always first seen in warm, 

 still mornings. 



On chalky and sandy r oils, and in the hot villages about 

 London, the thermometer has been often observed to mount 

 as high as 83 or 84 ; but with us, in this hilly and woody 

 district, I have hardly ever seen it exceed 80, nor does it 

 often arrive at that pitch. The reason, I conclude is, that 

 our dense clayey soil, so much shaded by trees, is not so 

 easily heated through as those above mentioned ; and, besides, 

 our mountains cause currents of air and breezes ; and the 

 vast effluvia from our woodlands temper and moderate our 

 heats. 



