The Natural History of Selborne 379 



twelve or fifteen inches without any drifting. In the evening of 

 the 9th the air began to be so very sharp that we thought it 

 would be curious to attend to the motions of a thermometer ; we 

 therefore hung out two, one made by Martin and one by Dollond, 

 which soon began to show us what we were to expect ; for by ten 

 o'clock they fell to 21, and at eleven to 4, when we went to bed. 

 On the loth, in the morning, the quicksilver of Dollond's glass was 

 down to half a degree below zero ; and that of Martin's, which was 

 absurdly graduated only to four degrees above zero, sunk quite into 

 the brass guard of the ball ; so that when the weather became most 

 interesting this was useless. On the loth, at eleven at night, though 

 the air was perfectly still, Dollond's glass went down to one degree 

 below 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 loth, written to Mr. , and entreated him to 



hang out his thermometer, made' by Adams, and to pay some atten- 

 tion to it morning and evening, expecting wonderful phenomena, 

 in so elevated a region, at two hundred feet or more above my house. 

 But, behold ! on the loth, at eleven 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, somehow, be wrongly constructed. But, when the instruments 

 came to be confronted, they went exactly together ; so that for one 

 night at least, the cold at Newton was 18 less than at Selborne ; 

 and, through the whole frost, 10 or I2 . 1 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 



* 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. 



1 I have observed an exactly similar fact on Hind Head, where the ther- 

 mometer on frosty nights often stands higher than in the valley below. ED. 



