280 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
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 the 
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 evapora- 
tion, and then in the night fa]] down again with the dews, in which 
they are entangled ; that the air is strongly scented, and therefore 
impregnated with the particles of towers in summer weather, our 
senses will inform us; and that this clammy sweet substance is of 
the 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 soils, 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. 
