WINTER OF 1784. 



at night, though the air was perfectly still, Dolland's 

 glass went down to one degree helow zero ! This 

 strange severity of the weather made me very desirous 

 to know what degree of cold there might be in such 

 an exalted and near situation as Newton. We had, 

 therefore, on the morning of the tenth, written to 

 Mr. , and entreated him to hang out his ther- 

 mometer, made by Adams, and to pay some attention 

 to it morning and evening, expecting wonderful phe- 

 nomena, in so elevated a region, at two hundred feet 

 or more above my house. But, behold! on the tenth, 

 at eleyen at night, it was down only to 17, and the 

 next morning at 22, when mine was at 10 ! We 

 were so disturbed at this unexpected reverse of 

 comparative local cold, that we sent one of my 

 glasses up, thinking that of Mr. must, some- 

 how, be wrongly constructed. But, when the in- 

 struments came to be confronted, they went exactly 

 together, so that, for one night at least, the cold at 

 Newton was 18 degrees less than at Selborne, and, 

 through the whole frost, 10 or 12 degrees; and, 

 indeed, when we came to observe consequences, we 

 could readily credit this, for all my laurustines, bays, 

 ilexes, arbutuses, cypresses, and even my Portugal 

 laurels,* and, which occasions more regret, my fine 

 sloping laurel-hedge, were scorched up, while, at 

 Newton, the same trees have not lost a leaf ! 



We had steady frost on the 25th, when the ther- 

 mometer, in the morning, was down to 10 with us, 

 and at Newton only to 21. Strong frost continued 

 till the thirty-first, when some tendency to thaw was 



* Mr. Miller, in his Gardener's Dictionary, says positively, that 

 the Portugal laurels remained untouched in the remarkable frost 

 of 1739-40. So that either that accurate observer was much 

 mistaken, or else the frost of December, 1784, was much more 

 severe and destructive than that in the year above-mentioned. 



