Excerpt from Essay on Dew: And Several Appearances Connected With It I was led, in the autumn of 1784, by the event of a rude experiment, to think it probable that the formation of dew is attended with the production of cold. In 1788, a paper on hoarfrost, by Mr. Patrick Wilson1 of Glasgow, was published in the first volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, by Which it appeared that this Opinion had been entertained by that gentleman before it had occurred to myself. In the course of the same year, Mr. Six of Canterbury mentioned in a paper communicated to the Royal Society, that, on clear and dewy nights, he always found the mercury lower in a thermometer laid upon the ground in a meadow in his neighbourhood, than it was in a similar thermometer suspended in the air, six feet above the former; and that, upon one night, the difference amounted to 5 Degrees of Fahrenheit's scale. Mr. Six, however, did not suppose, agreeably to the Opinion of Mr. Wilson and myself, that the cold was occasioned by the formation of dew but imagined that it proceeded partly from the low temperature of the air, through which the dew, already formed in the atmosphere. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.