Note 187 — PART SECOND. (continued 3)

At Strasburg, in Germany, our author says that he saw a man who had been an idiot for more than a year from a stroke of the sun. The 8th of July 1707 was so hot in England that many people died at their work, and many horses and oxen were killed by the sun’s rays. In 1743, eleven thousand people perished from the 14th to the 25th of July in the streets of Pekin in China. On the 30th of July, 1705, the heat at Montpelier was so great, that eggs were roasted by it. Chalmers, in his account of the weather and diseases of South Carolina, says, that he has seen a beef-steak, laid on a cannon for twenty minutes, deprived of its juices, and overdone by the excessive force of the sun’s rays.