sloping laurel-hedge, were scorched up; while, at Newton, the same trees had not lost a leaf!

We had steady frost on to the 25th, when the thermometer in the morning was down to 10° with us, and at Newton only to 21. Strong frost continued till the 31st, when some tendency to thaw was observed; and, by January the 3rd, 1785, the thaw was confirmed, and some rain fell.

A circumstance that I must not omit, because it was new to us, is, that on Friday, December the 10th, being bright sunshine, the air was full of icy spiculæ, floating in all directions, like atoms in a sun-beam let into a dark room. We thought them, at first, particles of the rime falling from my tall hedges; but were soon convinced to the contrary, by making our observations in open places where no rime could reach us. Were they watery particles of the air frozen as they floated; or were they evaporations from the snow frozen as they mounted?

We were much obliged to the thermometers for the early information they gave us; and hurried our apples, pears, onions, &c. into the cellar, and warm closets; while those who had not such warnings, or neglected them, lost all their stores of roots and fruits, and had their very bread and cheese frozen.

I must not omit to tell you, that, during those two Siberian days, my parlour-cat was so electric, that had a person stroked her, and been properly insulated, the shock might have been given to a whole circle of people.

I forgot to mention before, that, during the two 1784 was much more severe and destructive than that in the year above-mentioned. This, however, would depend more upon the absence of damp than on the actual degree of cold. -ED.

severe days, two men, who were tracking hares in the snow, had their feet frozen; and two others, who were much better employed, had their fingers so affected by the frost, while they were thrashing in a barn, that a mortification followed, from which they did not recover for many weeks.

This frost killed all the furze and most of the ivy, and in many places stripped the hollies of all their leaves. It came at a very early time of the year, before old November ended; and yet may be allowed from its effects to have exceeded any since 1739-40.

LETTER CVIII.

TO THE HONOURABLE DAINES BARRINGTON.

S the effects of heat are seldom very remarkable in the northerly climate of England, where the summers are often so defective in warmth and sun-shine as not to ripen the fruits of the earth so well as might be wished, I shall be more concise in my account of the intensity of a summer season, and so make a little amends for the prolix account of the degrees of cold, and the inconveniences that we suffered from some late rigorous winters.

The summers of 1781 and 1783 were unusually hot and dry; to them therefore I shall turn back in my journals, without recurring to any more distant period. In the former of these years, my peach and nectarine-trees suffered so much from the heat, that the rind on the bodies was scalded and came off; since which the trees have been in a decaying state.*

A frequent cause of decay in peaches and nectarines is their being excited by a few warm days in spring, when the sap vessels become filled with watery sap. In this state a severe frost sets in and then a thaw occurs: the sap vessels are burst by the frozen fluid, the economy of the tree deranged, and the sap ceases to flow in the injured branches.

This may prove a hint to assiduous gardeners to fence and shelter their wall-trees with mats or boards, as they may easily do, because such annoyance is seldom of long continuance. During that summer also, I observed that my apples were coddled, as it were, on the trees; so that they had no quickness of flavour, and they did not keep in the winter. This circumstance put me in mind of what I have heard travellers assert, that they never ate a good apple, or apricot, in the south of Europe, where the heats are so great as to render the juices vapid and insipid.

The great pests of a garden are wasps, which destroy all the finer fruits, just as they are coming into perfection. In 1781 we had none; in 1783 there were myriads; which would have devoured all the produce of my garden, had not we set the boys to take the nests; we caught thousands with hazel twigs tipped with bird-lime: and have since employed the boys to take and destroy the large breeding wasps in the spring. Such expedients 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 week, the most sweet and lovely objects that the eye could behold, became the next, the most loathsome; being

The first fine sunny day causes excessive perspiration in place of a regulated circulation, and the branch languishes and ultimately dies; to prevent all this, retard the trees in early spring, and protect them from spring frosts when started into growth.-ED.

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 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 we 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, I 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.

"It will hardly he deemed a discredit to an observer so patient and so accurate as Mr. White," says Mr. Mitford, "to point out how erroneous this explanation of honey-dew is. Mr. Curtis has shown that the substance in question is the excrement of the aphides. In order to convince a sceptical friend of this fact,' says Mr. Rennie, I placed a sheet of paper under a branch where some aphides were feeding, and over the leaves below them, which I had previously cleaned. The result was that the paper was soon covered with honey-dew, while the leaves below remained free.'"-ED.

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