200 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



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 em- 

 ployed 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 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 evaporation, 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 flowers 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. 



