404 *The Natural History of Selborne 



was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known 

 within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had 

 noticed this strange occurrence from June 23rd to July 2oth 

 inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter 

 without making any alteiation in the air. The sun, at noon, 

 looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured 

 ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms ; but was 

 particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. 1 

 All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could 

 hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed ; and the flies 

 swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the 

 horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people 

 began to look with a superstitious awe at the red, louring 

 aspect of the sun ; and indeed there was reason for the most 

 enlightened person to be apprehensive ; for, all the while, 

 Calabria and part of the isle of Sicily, were torn and convulsed 

 with earthquakes ; and about that juncture a volcano sprang 

 out of the sea on the coast of Norway. On this occasion 

 Milton's noble simile of the sun, in his first book of " Para- 

 dise Lost," frequently occurred to my mind ; and it is indeed 

 particularly applicable, because, towards the end, it alludes to 

 a superstitious kind of dread, with which the minds of men are 

 always impressed by such strange and unusual phenomena. 



" As when the sun, new risen, 



Looks through the horizontal, misty air, 

 Shorn of his beams ; or from behind the moon, 

 In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds 

 On half the nations, and with fear of change 

 Perplexes monarchs ." 



1 The close resemblance of these phenomena to those which were ob- 

 served to follow the great eruption of Krakatoa in Java renders it almost 

 certain that they were due to a similar volcanic origin. This is the more 

 likely since White specially notices volcanic activity throughout Europe as 

 concomitants of the lurid sunsets. But the volcanic dust on which these 

 appearances doubtless depended may more likely have come from some 

 extra- European crater, whose activity coincided with that of the European 

 system. ED. 



