1392. The history of frosts furnishes very extraordinary facts. The trees are often scorched and burnt up, as with the most excessive heat, in consequence of the separation of water from the air, which is therefore very drying. In the great frost in 1683, the trunks of oak, ash, walnut, and other trees, were miserably split and cleft, so that they might be seen through, and the cracks often attended with dreadful noises like the explosion of fire-arms. In the frost of 1837-8 large bushes of heath had their stems split by the frost into shreds, and the wood of the evergreen oak and that of the sweet bay was cracked and split in a similar manner.
