snow hut by the huddling together of three or four persons within it. When Dr Elisha Kane, the American explorer, passed a cold arctic winter's night in a hut beyond Smith's Sound, the temperature produced by its complement of lodgers, and two or three oil lamps, reached 90° F.; so that he was compelled by the heat to follow the example of the rest of the party, and partially to divest himself of his clothing. Yet in lat. 79° N., Dr Kane marked a temperature of 75° below zero in the month of February. No fluid could resist it. Even chloric ether became solid, and the air was pungent and acrid in respiration.

RED SNOW.

As if it had been ordained that there should be nothing absolute in nature, snow itself, the very type of whiteness, sometimes exhibits the most curious colouring. Who, for instance, has not heard tell of red snow?

Its existence

was even known to Pliny, the great Roman naturalist, and he attributed it to a dust with which the snow became covered after it had lain several days on the ground.

66

"Snow itself," he says,* "reddens with old age" (Ipsa nix vetustate rubescit).

Benedict de Saussure was the first who described red snow like a naturalist. He observed it on the occasion of his ascent of Mont Breven, near Chamounix, in 1760; and was greatly astonished at seeing the snow tinted in various * Pliny, "Historia Naturalis," Book xi.

+ De Saussure, "Voyage dans les Alpes," Book iii., p. 45 (ed. 1803, Neufchâtel).

40

VARIOUS EXPERIMENTS.

places of an extremely vivid red. "In the middle of each patch," he says, "was the greatest intensity of colour, and the middle, moreover, was of a lower level than the edges. On examining this red snow closely, I saw that its colour depended upon a fine powder which mingled with it, and which penetrated to a depth of two or three inches. This powder could not have descended from the summit of the mountain, since it was found in localities isolated and even remote from the rocks; nor did it seem to have been deposited by the winds, since it did not lie in drifts. One would have said that it was a production of the snow itself, a residuum of its thaw. . . . What at first suggested this opinion was the fact that the colour, extremely weak on the edges of each concave patch, gradually grew deeper as it approached the bottom, where the trickling water had carried down a greater quantity of residuum."

The learned Swiss naturalist found this red snow on many other mountains, and during a certain period of thaw, subjected it to various experiments, which led him to the conclusion that it was a vegetable matter, a dust, or pollen, of the stamens of plants." Slightly odorous, it exhaled, during combustion, a scent not unlike that of sealing-wax.

66

Ramond met with red snow in the Pyrenees, at an elevation of 7800 feet. He discovered in it, when burnt on incandescent coals, the odour of opium or of chicory. He supposed that the little deep red lamella which coloured the snow were mica, and looked upon the mica as a product of the decompo

IS IT A MUSHROOM?

4:

sition of the rocks by the action of the sun and breezes of spring. But this opinion was overthrown by Captain Ross, who, in 1819, found red snow in Baffin's Bay (lat. 85° 54′ N.), to a depth of thirteen feet, over a soil perfectly free from mica. Other explorers affirm that in those regions they have never met with the red snow more than three to four inches deep. Captain Parry, in his Polar voyage, found this coloured snow principally in the track of his sledges; and, agreeing with Sir John Ross, he supposed it to derive its redness from the presence of a kind of mushroom, of the genus Uredo, to which Bauer has given the name of Uredo nivalis.* According to experiments made by Bauer on specimens brought from the Polar regions, these tiny mushrooms are, on the average, a fiftieth of a millimètre in diameter; they develop themselves like vegetables; the youngest are sometimes colourless; when entirely freed from snow, they grow black under the influence. of an intense cold, without losing their germinative faculty, and give birth, under the influence of a higher temperature, to a green matter.

Let us continue to examine the difference of opinion between naturalists.

De Candolle declared the red snow of the polar regions to be identical with that of the Alps, after having carefully compared the two. But he saw in it a genus of cryptogams, differing from the genus Uredo.† Robert Brown asserted that

Annales de Chimie et de Physique, vol. xxvii., p. 134. + Philosophical Transactions, 1820, vol. ii., p. 165.

42

OPINION OF MODERN NATURALISTS.

it was a kind of alga, allied to the Tremella cruenta. Azara was of this same opinion, except that, instead of a tremella, he recognised in it an alga of the genus Protococcus, which he called Protococcus kermesinus, because its colour resembled that of the kermes, or cochineal.

In the opinion of the observers whom we have cited, the colouring corpuscles of the snow belong to the vegetable kingdom. This opinion was supported by numerous adherents, and soon acquired so great an authority, that, in an assembly of naturalists at Lausanne, De Candolle overwhelmed with sarcasm a communication from Lamont, Prior of the Hospice of St Bernard, on the "animality of red snow." And yet this last hypothesis was not so rash as might have been supposed; for Dr Scoresby, to whom we owe a profound study on the crystalline forms of snow, had already attributed to an animal matter the colouring of the snow and polar ice.

Now-a-days, however, it may be regarded as finally settled that this phenomenon is due to the immense aggregation of minute plants belonging to the species called Protococcus nivalis;* so called in allusion to the extreme simplicity of its organisation, and the peculiar nature of its habitat. If we place a portion of the snow coloured with this plant upon a piece of white paper, says Mr Macmillan,† and allow it to melt and evaporate, we find a residuum of granules just sufficient

It is but fair to add, however, that Vogt and others contend for the animal origin of this substance, and regard the Protococcus nivalis as simply a development of the infusoria, Disceræa nivalis.

Macmillan, "Footnotes from the Page of Nature," pp. 141-143.

THE PROTOCOCCUS NIVALIS.

43

to give a faint crimson tinge to the paper. Placed under the microscope, these granules resolve themselves into spherical purple cells, from the Tooth to the sooth part of an inch in diameter. Each of these cells has an opening, surrounded by serrated or indented lines, whose smallest diameter does not exceed the roooth part of an inch! When perfect, the plant is not unlike a red-currant berry; as it decays, the red colouring matter fades into a deep orange, and the deep orange changes into a dull brown. The thickness of the wall of the cell does not exceed the 20000th part of an inch! Each cell may be considered a distinct individual plant, since it is perfectly independent of others with which it may be aggregated, and performs for and by itself all the functions of growth and reproduction, having a containing membrane which absorbs liquids and gases from the surrounding matrix or elements, a contained fluid of peculiar character, formed out of these materials, and a number of excessively minute granules, equivalent to spores, or, as some would say, to cellular buds, which are to become the genus of new plants. There is something, adds Mr Macmillan, extremely mysterious in the performance of these

widely different func

tions, by an organism

FIG. 8.-Protococcus nivalis.

which appears so excessively simple. That one and the same primitive cell should thus minister equally to absorption, nutrition, and reproduction, is an extraordinary illustration of the fact, that the smallest and simplest organised object is, in itself, and for the part it was created to perform in the ope