27 
ON FOG. 
By W. H. STONE, M.B. 
I T is hardly a matter of surprise that there should occur peri- 
odical crises of public excitement on the subject of London 
fog. Indeed, it is strong evidence of the influence of familiarity 
in securing toleration that so little attention is usually paid to 
it. To foreigners the thing is mysterious, and almost awful. 
The plague of Egyptian darkness, chronicled in Holy Writ as a 
direct interposition of Divine vengeance with the object of terri- 
fying a recreant tyrant into submission, is received with the 
hush of horror ; and yet the inhabitants of England’s metro- 
polis calmly endure an exactly similar infliction to that recorded 
in the book of Exodus, not only without terror, but almost 
without remark. It is even similar in the fact of an extremely 
definite line of demarcation by which the darkness is occasionally 
bounded, and by the transparency of atmosphere, the persist- 
ence of daylight, which causes neighbouring spots to resemble 
the land of Goshen. ‘No words,’ says Mons. Taine in his 
Notes sur V Angleterre, ‘ can describe the fog in winter. There 
are days when, while holding a man by the hand, you cannot 
see his face.’ He quotes, moreover, from a writer whom he 
terms ‘ the greatest contemporary English painter,’ a descrip- 
tion so graphic and so scientifically accurate as to be worth 
reproducing : — 
‘ It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and 
dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated 
lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking ; inanimate 
London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being 
visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights 
flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing 
themselves to be night- creatures that had no business abroad 
under the sun ; while the sun itself, when it was for a few 
minutes dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed 
as if it had gone out, and were collapsing flat and cold. Even 
