PREFACE. 
THE observations of the past year have given us an unusually 
good opportunity of remarking how far amount of presence of 
injurious insects may be affected (or not affected at all) by 
exceptionally low temperatures, such as those from which we 
suffered in January and February of 1895. From records of 
extreme lowness of temperature taken from instruments in the 
regular Stevenson’s screens,* we find the extraordinarily low 
minima that were registered at various stations from Aberdeen 
to Kent, thus ranging at distances from the North of Scotland 
to the South of England. ‘These show readings below zero as 
follows: —17° at Braemar, Aberdeen; —138° Esthwaite, Lan- 
cashire; — 8° Ketton, Rutland; —5° Loughborough; and —8° 
Bromley, Kent. That is to say, in the popular manner of expressing 
amount of cold, temperatures in order given above respectively 
of forty-nine, forty-five, forty, thirty-seven, and forty ‘‘degrees of 
frost’’—7.e. degrees below freezing-point, which is 32° Fahrenheit. 
At Loughborough the ‘“‘mean”’ of the temperatures of the 
ten days from the 5th to the 14th of February inclusive was only 
16°5°—that is, within a few fractions, sixteen ‘‘ degrees of frost.” 
These notes refer to the air temperatures, of which full records 
are given in our meteorological publications, and also with 
additions of local circumstances exceedingly serviceable for 
comparison with subsequent local insect conditions, and in the 
‘Times’ daily meteorological reports published during the con- 
tinuance of the unusual cold. 
But beyond this, and in regard to the still more important 
point as to effects on insect life of the amount of cold to which 
they are exposed in the ground wherein they lie, I take leave to 
quote Mr. Symons’s words: ‘‘ Another striking proof of the 
severity of the 1895 frost is afforded by the temperature of the 
earth’ (‘Monthly Meteorological Magazine’ for March, 1895). 
* See Symons’s ‘ Monthly Meteorological Magazine’ for March, 1895. 
London: Edward Stanford. 
