286 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



appearance, unlike anything known within the memory 

 of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this 

 strange occurrence from June 23 to July 20 inclusive, 

 during which period the wind varied to every quarter with- 

 out making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, 

 looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust- 

 coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of 

 rooms ; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at 

 rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense 

 that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after 

 it was killed ; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and 

 hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding 

 irksome. The country people began to look with a super- 

 stitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun ; and 

 indeed there was reason for the most enlightened person 

 to be apprehensive ; for, all the while, Calabria and part 

 of the Isle of Sicily, were torn and convulsed with earth- 

 quakes ; and about that juncture a volcano sprung out of 

 the sea on the coast of Norway. On this occasion Milton's 

 noble simile of the sun, in his first book of Paradise Lost, 

 frequently occurred to my mind ; and it is indeed par- 

 ticularly applicable, because, towards the end, it alludes 

 to a superstitious kind of dread, with which the minds of 

 men are always impressed by such strange and unusual 

 phsenomena. 



..." As when the sun, new risen, 



Looks through the horizontal, misttj air, 



Shorn of his beams ; or from behind the moon. 



In dim eclipse, disastrous Iwiliijhl sheds 



On half the nations, and with /ear of change 



Perplexes nionarclis." . . . 



