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the heats were so great as to render the juices vapid and 

 insipid. 



The great pests of a garden are wasps, which destroy all 

 the finer fruits just as they are coming into perfection. In 

 1781 we had none; in 1783 there were myriads; which 

 would have devoured all the produce of my garden, had not 

 we 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 instanced in the two 

 years above mentioned. 



In the sultry season of 1 783 honey-dews were so frequent 

 as to deface and destroy the beauties of my garden. My 

 honey-suckles, 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 sub- 

 stance, 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 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 seen first in warm still mornings. 



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 

 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 ; 



