NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 197 



of the loth, written to Mr. , and intreated him to hang 



out his thermometer, made by Adams, and to pay some 

 attention 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 ten ! 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 instru- 

 ments came to be confronted, they went exactly together ; 

 so that for one night at least, the cold at Newton was 18 

 degrees less than at Selborne ; and, through the whole frost, 

 10 or 12 degrees, 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 laurel-hedge, were scorched up ; while at 

 Newton, the same trees have not lost a leaf ! 



We had steady frost on to the 25th, when the ther- 

 mometer in the morning was down to 10 with us, and at 

 Newton only to 21. Strong frost continued till the 3ist, 

 when some tendency to thaw was observed ; and, by 

 January the 3d, 1785, the thaw was confirmed, and some 

 rain fell. 



A circumstance that I must not omit, because it was 

 new to us, is, that on Friday, December the loth, being 

 bright sun-shine, the air was full of icy spiculce, floating in 

 all direction, like atoms in a sun-beam let into a dark room. 

 We thought them at first particles of the rime falling from 

 my tall hedges ; but were soon convinced to the contrary, 

 by making our observations in open places where no rime 

 could reach us. Were they watery particles of the air 



1 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. [G. W.] 



