had no quickness of flavour, and would 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 were 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, and caught thousands with hazel-twigs tipped with bird-lime: we 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 in every hot summer, 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 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 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 clammy sweet substance is of the vegetable kind we may learn from bees, to whom it is very grateful: and we may be assured

1 These are what are known as "foundress wasps "—impregnated queens which struggle through the winter and become mothers of colonies in the succeeding season. The destruction of one such pregnant female in early spring is equivalent to the destruction of an entire nest in summer. -ED.

that it falls in the night, because it is always first seen in warm still mornings.1

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 effluvia from our woodlands temper and moderate our heats.

1 Honey-dew is now known to be mainly produced by aphides, which White here incidentally notices side by side with it, without suspecting their casual connection. It is possible that a small amount of honeydew may be exuded by the plants themselves, but by far the greater portion is undoubtedly due to the secretions of plant-lice.—ED.

T

LETTER LXV.

To the same.

HE summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phanomena; for, besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits,

was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23rd to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting.1 All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people began to look with a superstitious awe at the red, louring aspect of the sun; and indeed there was reason for the most enlightened person to be apprehensive; for, all the while, Calabria and part of the isle of Sicily, were torn and convulsed with earthquakes; and about that juncture a volcano sprang out of the sea on the coast of Norway. On this occasion Milton's noble simile of the sun, in his first book of "Paradise Lost," frequently occurred to my mind; and it is indeed particularly applicable, because, towards the end, it alludes to a superstitious kind of dread, with which the minds of men are always impressed by such strange and unusual phænomena. As when the sun, new risen,

Looks through the horizontal, misty air,

Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds

On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs

1 The close resemblance of these phenomena to those which were observed to follow the great eruption of Krakatoa in Java renders it almost certain that they were due to a similar volcanic origin. This is the more likely since White specially notices volcanic activity throughout Europe as concomitants of the lurid sunsets. But the volcanic dust on which these appearances doubtless depended may more likely have come from some extra-European crater, whose activity coincided with that of the European system. - ED.