of Selborne 251 



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 fre- 

 quent as to deface and destroy tlie 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 ; that the air 

 is strongly scented, and therefore impregnated with the 

 particles of flowers in summer weather, our senses will in- 

 form 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 seen first 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. 



LETTER LXV 



TO THE HONOURABLE DAINES BARRINGTON 



The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and por- 

 tentous one, and full of horrible phrenomcna ; for besides 

 the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that 

 affrighted and distressed the different counties of this 



