280 NA TURAL HIST OR Y O-F SELBORNE . 



In the sultry season of 1783, honey-dews were so frequent as to 

 deface and destroy the beauties of my garden. My 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 evapora- 

 tion, 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 rtowers 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 first seen 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 ; 

 and the vast effluvia from our woodlands temper and moderate 

 our heats. 



