328 SUMMERS OF 1781 AND 1783. 



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 

 the 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 in- 

 stanced 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 ap- 

 pearance seems to be this, that in hot weather, the 

 effluvia of flowers in fields, and meadows, and gar- 

 dens, 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 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 ob- 

 served 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 



