196 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



promise to say no more about the severities of winter after I have 

 finished this letter. 



The first week in December was very wet, with the barometer very 

 low. On the 7th, with the barometer at 28*5 came on a vast 

 snow, which continued all that day and the next, and most part ot 

 the following night ; so that by the morning of the 9th the works of 

 men were quite overwhelmed, the lanes filled so as to be impassable, 

 and the ground covered twelve or fifteen inches without any drifting. 

 In the evening of the 9th the air began to be so very sharp that we 

 thought it would be curious to attend to the motions of a thermometer ; 

 we therefore hung out two, one made by Martin and one by Dollond, 

 which soon began to show us what we were to expect ; for by ten 

 o'clock, they fell to 21, and at eleven to 4, when we went to bed. On 

 the 10th, in the morning, the quicksilver of Dollond's glass was down 

 to half a degree below zero ; and that of Martin's, which was absurdly 

 graduated only to four degrees above zero, sunk quite into the brass 

 guard of the ball ; so that when the weather became most interesting 

 this was useless. On the 10th, at eleven at night, though the air was 

 perfectly still, Dollond's glass went down to one degree below zero ! 

 This strange severity of the weather made me very desirous to know 

 what degree of cold there might be in such an exalted and near 

 situation as Newton. We had therefore, on the morning of the 10th, 



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 10th, at 

 eleven at night, it was down only to 17, and the next morning at 22, 

 when mine was at 10 ! 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 instruments came to be confronted, they went exactly 

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

 less than at Selborne ; and, through the whole frost, 10 or 12 ; 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 thermometer in the 

 morning was down to 10 with us, and at Newton only to 21. Strong 

 frost continued till the 31st, when some tendency to thaw was observed ; 

 and, by January the 3rd, 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 10th, being bright sunshine, the 

 air was full of icy spiculce, floating in all directions, like atoms in a 



* 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. 



