THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, 247 
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 entan- 
gled ; that the air is strongly scented, and therefore impreg- 
nated 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 dis- 
trict, I have hardly ever seen it exeeed 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. 
(LETTER. IGX. 
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 
1 This explanation of the origin of honey-dew is incorrect. It is now 
known to be exuded by aphides, a genus of insects of the order Hemiptera. 
Honey-dew is a favorite food of ants. 
