OF SELBORNE 231 



to them therefore I shall turn back in my journals, without 

 recurring to any more distant period. In the former of these 

 years my peach and nectarine-trees suffered so much from the 

 heat that the rind on the bodies was scalded and came off; 

 since which the trees have been in a decaying state. This may 

 prove a hint to assiduous gardeners to fence and shelter their 

 wall-trees with mats or boards, as they may easily do, because 

 such annoyance is seldom of long continuance. During that 

 summer also, I observed that my apples were coddled, as it 

 were, on the trees ; so that they had no quickness of flavour, 

 and would not keep in the winter. This circumstance put me 

 in mind of what I have heard travellers assert, that they never 

 ate a good apple or apricot in the south of Europe, where 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 1783 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 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 

 evaporation, and then in the night fall down again with the dews, 

 in which they are entangled ; l that the air is strongly scented, 



1 [White's explanation of the origin of honey-dew is quite impossible. Perhaps 

 he got his fanciful explanation from Hales (Statical Essays, vol. ii. , p. 357), who 

 suggests that the chief use of pollen is to disperse ' ' an atmosphere of sublimed sul- 

 phurous pounce (for many trees and plants abound with it), which uniting with the- 

 air particles, they, or a very sublimed spirit from them, may perhaps be inspired or 

 imbibed at several parts of the plant, and especially at the Pistillum, and be thence 

 conveyed to the Capsula seminalis, etc." ; or he may have read in Pliny that honey- 

 dew falls from heaven. Reaumur (Hist, des Insectes, voL ill, Mtm. ix.) long ago 



