801 
NATURAL HISTORY 
and thereabouts; but on tlie 21st it descended to 20°. Tbe 
birds now began to be in a very pitiable and starving con- 
dition. Tamed by tbe season^ skylarks settled in the streets 
of towns, because they saw the ground was bare; rooks 
frequented dunghills close to houses, and crows watched 
horses as they passed, and greedily devoured what dropped 
from them ; hares now came into men's gardens, and scraping 
away the snow, devoured such plants as they could find. 
On the 22nd the author had occasion to go to London, 
through a sort of Laplandian scene, very wild and grotesque 
indeed. But the metropolis itself exhibited a still more 
singular appearance than the country ; for being imbedded 
deep in snow, the pavement of the streets could not be 
touched by the wheels or the horses' feet, so that the 
carriages ran about without the least noise. Such an ex- 
emption from din and clatter was strange, but not pleasant ; 
it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of desolation : 
" ipsa silentia terrent." 
On the 27th much snow fell all day, and in the evening 
the frost became very intense. At South Lambeth, for the 
four following nights, the thermometer fell to IT, 7% 6% 6"; 
and at Selborne to T*', 6^, 10^; and on the 31st of January, 
just before sunrise, with rime on the trees and on the tubes 
of the glass, the quicksilver sunk exactly to zero, being 
32° below the freezing point; but by eleven in the morning, 
though in the shade, it sprung up to 16f°^ — a most unusual 
degree of cold this for the south of England ! During these 
four nights the cold was so penetrating that it occasioned 
ice in warm chambers and under beds ; and in the day the 
wind was so keen that persons of robust constitution could 
scarcely endure to face it. The Thames was at once so 
frozen over, both above and below bridge that crowds ran 
^ At Selborne the cold was greater than at any other place that the 
author could hear of with certainty ; though some reported at the time 
that at a village in Kent the thermometer fell 2° below zero, viz., 34'^ 
below the freezing point. 
The thermometer used at Selborne was graduated by Benjamin 
Martin.— G. W. 
