236 WHITE 



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 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 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. 1 



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 dis- 

 trict, 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 wood-lands temper and moderate our heats. 



NOTE 



1 White's explanation of the origin of honey-dew is ingenious but incor- 

 rect. It is now ascertained to be an exudation from the aphides themselves. 

 It is by some called their excrement. G. C. D. 



LETTER LXV 



THE summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and por- 

 tentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for, besides 

 the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that 

 affrighted and distressed the different counties of this king- 

 dom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many 

 weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even 



