at 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 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 degrees or 84
degrees; but with us, in this hilly and woody district, I have hardly
ever seen it exceed 80 degrees, 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 LXV.

The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full
of horrible phenomena; for, besides the alarming meteors and tremendous
thunderstorms 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-c