198 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



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 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. 



LETTEE LXY. 



TO THE SAME. 



i 



THE summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, 

 and full of horrible phenomena ; for, besides the alarming meteors and 

 tremendous thunder storms that affrighted and distressed the different 

 counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed 

 for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even 

 beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike any- 

 thing known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that 

 I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23rd to July 20th 



