not damaged at all, save in sunny places; the wheat looked delicately,
and the garden plants were well preserved; for snow is the most kindly
mantle that infant vegetation can be wrapped in; were it not for that
friendly meteor no vegetable life could exist at all in northerly
regions. Yet in Sweden the earth in April is not divested of snow for
more than a fortnight before the face of the country is covered with
flowers.
Letter LXII
To The Honourable Daines Barrington
There were some circumstances attending the remarkable frost in January
1776 so singular and striking, that a short detail of them may not be
unacceptable.
The most certain way to be exact will be to copy the passages from my
journal, which were taken from time to time as things occurred. But it
may be proper previously to remark that the first week in January was
uncommonly wet, and drowned with vast rains from every quarter: from
whence may be inferred, as there is great reason to believe is the
case, that intense frosts seldom take place till the earth is perfectly
glutted and chilled with water;* and hence dry autumns are seldom
followed by rigorous winters.
* The autumn preceding January 1768 was very wet, and particularly the
month of September, during which there fell at Lyndon, in the county of
Rutland, six inches and an half of rain. And the terrible long frost of
1739-40 set in after a rainy season, and when the springs were very
high.
January 7th. — Snow driving all the day, which was followed by frost,
sleet, and some snow, till the 12th, when a prodigious mass overwhelmed
all the works of men, drifting over the tops of the gates and filling
the hollow lanes.
On the 14th the writer was obliged to be much abroad; and thinks he
never before or since has encountered such rugged Siberian weather.
Many of the narrow roads were now filled above the tops of the hedges;
through which the snow was driven into most romantic and grotesque
shapes, so striking to the imagination as not to be seen without wonder
and pleasure. The poultry dared not to stir out of their
roosting-places; for cocks and hens are so dazzled and confounded by
the glare of snow that they would soon perish without assistance. The
hares also lay sullenly in their seats, and would not move until
compelled by hunger; being conscious, poor animals, that the drifts and
heaps treacherously betray their footsteps, and prove fatal to numbers
of them.
From the 14th the snow continued to increase, and began to stop the
road waggons and coaches, which could no longer keep on their regular
stages; and especially on the western roads, where the fall appears to
have been deeper than in the south. The company at Bath, that wanted to
attend the Queen’s birth-day, were strangely incommoded: many carriages
of persons, who got, in their way to town from Bath, as far as
Marlborough, after strange embarrassments, here met with a ne plus
ultra. The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers, if
they would shovel them a track to London; but the relentless heaps of
snow were too bulky to be removed; and so the 18th passed over, leaving
the company in very uncomfortable circumstances at the Castle and other
inns.
On the 20th the sun shone out for the first time since the frost began;
a circumstance that has been remarked before much in favour of
vegetation. All this time the cold was not very intense, for the
thermometer stood at 29, 28, 25, and thereabout; but on the 21st it
descended to 20. The birds now began to be in a very pitiable and
starving condition. Tamed by the season, skylarks settled in the
streets of towns, because they saw the ground was bare; rooks
frequented dunghills close to houses; and crows watched horses as they
passed, and greedily devoured what dropped from them; hares now came
into men’s gardens, and, scraping away the snow, devoured such plants
as they could find.
On the 22nd the author had occasion to go to London through a sort of
Laplandian-scene, very wild and grotesque indeed. But the metropolis
itself exhibited a still more singular appearance than the country;
for, being bedded deep in snow, the pavement of the streets could not
be touched by the wheels or the horses’ feet, so that the carriages ran
about without the least noise. Such an exception from din and clatter
was strange, but not pleasant; it seemed to convey an uncomfortable
idea of desolation:
… ipsa silentia terrent.
On the 27th much snow fell all day, and in the evening the frost became
very intense. At South Lambeth, for the four following nights, the
thermometer fell to 11, 7, 6, 6; and at Selborne to 7, 6, 10; and on
the 31st January, just before sunrise, with rime on the trees and on
the tube of the glass, the quicksilver sunk exactly to zero, being 32
degrees below the freezing point; but by eleven in the morning, though
in the shade, it sprung up to 16.5 * — a most unusual degree of cold
this for the south of England! During these four nights the cold was so
penetrating that it occasioned ice in warm chambers and under beds; and
in the day the wind was so keen that persons of robust constitutions
could scarcely endure to face it. The Thames was at once so frozen over
both above and below bridge that crowds ran about on the ice. The
streets were now strangely incumbered with snow, which crumbled and
trod dusty; and, turning grey, resembled bay-salt; what had fallen on
the roofs was so perfectly dry that, from first to last, it lay
twenty-six days on the houses in the city; a longer time than had been
remembered by the oldest housekeepers living. According to all
appearances we might now have expected the continuance of this rigorous
weather for weeks to come, since every night increased in severity; but
behold, without any apparent cause, on the 1st of February a thaw took
place, and some rain followed before night; making good the observation
above, that frosts often go off as it were at once, without any gradual
declension of cold. On the second of February the thaw persisted; and
on the 3d swarms of little insects were frisking and sporting in a
court-yard at South Lambeth, as if they had felt no frost. Why the
juices in the small bodies and smaller limbs of such minute beings are
not frozen is a matter of curious inquiry.
* At Selborne the cold was greater than at any other place that the
author could hear of with certainty: though some reported at the time
that at a village in Kent, the thermometer fell two degrees below zero,
viz., 34 degrees below the freezing point. The thermometer used at
Selborne was graduated by Benjamin Martin.
Severe frosts seem to be partial, or to run in currents; for, at the
same juncture, as the author was informed by accurate correspondents,
at Lyndon in the county of Rutland, the thermometer stood at 19: at
Blackburn, in Lancashire, at 19: and at Manchester at 21, 20, and 18.
Thus does some unknown circumstance strangely overbalance latitude, and
render the cold sometimes much greater in the southern than in the
northern parts of this kingdom.
The consequences of this severity were, that in Hampshire, at the
melting of the snow, the wheat looked well, and the turnips came forth
little injured. The laurels and laurustines were somewhat damaged, but
only in hot aspects. No evergreens were quite destroyed; and not half
the damage sustained that befell in January, 1768. Those laurels that
were a little scorched on the south-sides were perfectly untouched on
their north-sides. The care taken to shake the snow day by day from the
branches seemed greatly to avail the author’s evergreens. A neighbour’s
laurel-hedge, in a high situation, and facing to the north, was
perfectly green and vigorous; and the Portugal laurels remained unhurt.
As to the birds, the thrushes and blackbirds were mostly destroyed; and
the partridges, by the weather and poachers, were so thinned that few
remained to breed the following year.
Letter LXIII
To The Honourable Daines Barrington
As the frost in December, 1784, was very extraordinary, you, I trust,
will not be displeased to hear the particulars; and especially when I
promise to say no more about the severities of winter after I have
finished this letter.
The first week in December was very wet, with the barometer very low.
On the 7th, with the barometer at 28-five-tenths, came on a vast snow,
which continued all that day and the next, and most part of the
following night; so that by the morning of the 9th the works of men
were quite overwhelmed, the lanes filled so as to be impassable, and
the ground covered twelve or fifteen inches without any drifting. In
the evening of the 9th the air began to be so very sharp that we
thought it would be curious to attend to the motions of a thermometer:
we therefore hung out two; one made by Martin and one by Dollond, which
soon began to show us what we were to expect; for, by ten o’clock, they
fell to 21, and at eleven to 4, when we went to bed. On the 10th, in
the morning, the quicksilver of Dollond’s glass was down to half a
degree below zero; and that of Martin’s, which was absurdly graduated
only to four degrees above zero, sunk quite into the brass guard of the
ball; so that when the weather became most interesting this was
useless. On the 10th, at eleven at night, though the air was perfectly
still, Dollond’s glass went down to one degree below zero! This strange
severity of the weather made me very desirous to know what degree of
cold there might be in such an exalted and near situation as Newton. We
had therefore, on the morning of the 10th, written to Mr. ——, and
entreated him to hang out his thermometer, made by Adams; and to pay
some attention to it morning and evening; expecting wonderful
phaenomena, in so elevated a region, at two hundred feet or more above
my house. But, behold! on the 10th, at eleven at night, it was down
only to 17, and the next morning at 22, when mine was at 10. We were so
disturbed at this unexpected reverse of comparative local cold, that we
sent one of my glasses up, thinking that of Mr. —— must, somehow, be
wrongly constructed. But, when the instruments came to be confronted,
they went exactly together: so that, for one night at least, the cold
at Newton was 18 degrees less than at Selborne; and, through the whole
frost, 10 or 12 degrees; and indeed, when we came to observe
consequences, we could readily credit this; for all my laurustines,
bays, ilexes, arbutuses, cypresses, and even my Portugal laurels,* and
(which occasions more regret) my fine sloping laurel hedge, were
scorched up; while, at Newton, the same trees have not lost a leaf!
* Mr. Miller, in his Gardener’s Dictionary, says positively that the
Portugal laurels remained untouched in the remarkable frost of 1739–40.
So that either that accurate observer was much mistaken, or else the
frost of December, 1784, was much more severe and destructive than that
in the year above mentioned.
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 sun-shine, the air was full
of icy spiculae, 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, potatoes, etc., into
the cellar, and warm closets; while those who had not, or neglected
such warnings, 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 severe days, two men,
who were tracing hares in the snow, had their feet frozen; and two men,
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 it may be allowed from
its effects to have exceeded any since 1739–40.
Letter LXIV
To The Honourable Daines Barrington
As the effects of heat are seldom very remarkable in the northerly
climate of England, where the summers are often so defective in warmth
and sunshine 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 severity 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 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. 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 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 beats 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 honey-suckles, 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 seen first 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 effluvia
from our woodlands temper and moderate our heats.
Letter LXV
To The Honourable Daines Barrington
The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full
of horrible phaenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and tremendous
thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of
this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smokey 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 23 to July 20 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. 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
sprung 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, frequency
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
phaenomena.
… 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….
Letter LXVI
To The Honourable Daines Barrington
We are very seldom annoyed with thunder-storms; and it is no less
remarkable than true, that those which arise in the south have hardly
been known to reach this village; for before they get over us, they
take a direction to the east or to the west, or sometimes divide into
two, and go in part to one of those quarters, and in part to the other;
as was truly the case in summer 1783, when though the country round was
continually harassed with tempests and often from the south, yet we
escaped them all; as appears by my journal of that summer. The only way
that I can at all account for this fact—for such it is — is that, on
that quarter, between us and the sea, there are continual mountains,
hill behind hill, such as Nore-hill, the Barnet, Butser-hill, and
Ports-down, which somehow divert the storms, and give them a different
direction. High promontories, and elevated grounds, have always been
observed to attract clouds and disarm them of their mischievous
contents, which are discharged into the trees and summits as soon as
they come in contact with those turbulent meteors; while the humble
vales escape, because they are so far beneath them.
But, when I say I do not remember a thunder-storm from the south, I do
not mean that we never have suffered from thunder-storms at all; for on
June 5th, 1784, the thermometer in the morning being at 64, and at noon
at 70, the barometer at 29, six-tenths one-half, and the wind north, I
observed a blue mist, smelling strongly of sulphur, hanging along our
sloping woods, and seeming to indicate that thunder was at hand. I was
called in about two in the afternoon, and so missed seeing the
gathering of the clouds in the north; which they who were abroad
assured me had something uncommon in its appearance. At about a quarter
after two the storm began in the parish of Hartley, moving slowly from
north to south; and from thence it came over Norton-farm, and so to
Grange-farm, both in this parish. It began with vast drops of rain,
which were soon succeeded by round hail, and then by convex pieces of
ice, which measured three inches in girth. Had it been as extensive as
it was violent, and of any continuance (for it was very short), it must
have ravaged all the neighbourhood. In the parish of Hartley it did
some damage to one farm; but Norton, which lay in the centre of the
storm, was greatly injured; as was Grange, which lay next to it. It did
but just reach to the middle of the village, where the hail broke my
north windows, and all my garden-lights and hand-glasses, and many of
my neighbours’ windows. The extent of the storm was about two miles in
length and one in breadth. We were just sitting down to dinner; but
were soon diverted from our repast by the clattering of tiles and the
jingling of glass. There fell at the same time prodigious torrents of
rain on the farms above-mentioned, which occasioned a flood as violent
as it was sudden; doing great damage to the meadows and fallows, by
deluging the one and washing away the soil of the other. The hollow
lane towards Alton was so torn and disordered as not to be passable
till mended, rocks being removed that weighed 200 weight. Those that
saw the effect which the great hail had on ponds and pools say that the
dashing of the water made an extraordinary appearance, the froth and
spray standing up in the air three feet above the surface. The rushing
and roaring of the hail, as it approached, was truly tremendous.
Though the clouds at South Lambeth, near London, were at that juncture
thin and light, and no storm was in sight, nor within hearing, yet the
air was strongly electric; for the bells of an electric machine at that
place rang repeatedly, and fierce sparks were discharged.
When I first took the present work in hand I proposed to have added an
Annus Historico-naturalis, or the Natural History of the Twelve Months
of the Year; which would have comprised many incidents and occurrences
that have not fallen in my way to be mentioned in my series of letters;
— but, as Mr. Aikin of Warrington has lately published somewhat of this
sort, and as the length of my correspondence has sufficiently put your
patience to the test, I shall here take a respectful leave of you and
natural history together; and am,
With all due deference and regard,
Your most obliged,
And most humble servant,
GIL. WHITE.
Selborne,
June 25, 1787.