288 
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 then, 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 honey- 
suckles, which were one w^eek 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 
apliides, or smother- flies. The occasion of this clammy appear- 
ance 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 sweet clammy substance is of the vegetable kind w^e 
may learn from bees, to whom it is very grateful : we may also 
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, 
1 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 evaporation from our 
woodlands tempers and moderates our heats. 
