386 The Natural History of Selborne 



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 alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, 

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

 ginous 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 " Paradise 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. 



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 observed 

 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. 



