CRUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. 163 
endemically among the healthy crews of vessels lately arrived from the Arctic. It is related of a 
ship of the Franklin Search Expedition, the North Star, which was frozen up during one of the 
severest Arctic winters on record, in Wostenholm Sound, that the men maintained their health 
perfectly during all the trials to which they were exposed; but on their return to England in the 
early summer, every man within a week was on the sick list with some form of bronchial or 
pulinonary disorder. The reporter assigns the shaving off the beard as the cause of this illness. 
On board the Gorwin on her return to San Francisco in October, and at a time, too, when “ the 
glorious climate of California” appeared at its best, no such cause existed, yet colds of the most 
violent kind prevailed generally among a previously healthy crew. 
Before dropping the question, it may be asked whether the psychical effects of climate were not 
apparent in some of the subjective sensations as experienced by myself and others. Something 
more than auditory spectra must account for some of them. 
For instance, when climbing a steep cliff, with no sound to interrupt except the scream of wild 
sea-birds, or ascending a mountain side amid scenery the most desolate that can well be conceived, 
and in a stillness so great that the arterial pulsations are audible, how is it that certain trains of 
the most incongruous and absurd thoughts usurp a prominence in the mind? Onsuch an occasion, 
why should the strains from wedding-marches be continually running through one’s head? What 
gives birth to the floating succession of ideas regarding the delights of prospective dinners? And 
why does the presence of the midnight sun cause one to forget, like Horace Greeley, whether one 
has dined or not? While navigating through ice and fog, often within sight of a coast that is 
treeless and swardless, why should one dream of the laughing aspect of tropical vegetation, and 
of swinging in a hammock in a garden through which the summer wind bears the fragrance of 
flowers? And why should a diet of pork and beans cause a man during a series of nights to dream 
of sumptuous dinners, and at other times in his dreams to take part in a Barmicidal feast ? 
Among various meteorological phenomena witnessed during the cruise were parhelias and fog 
bows, which were of common occurrence off Wrangel Island; and toward the latter part of our 
stay in the Arctic, when the sun was no longer in the summer solstice, northern lights of varying 
intensity appeared, a peculiarity about one of them being a white are extending across the heavens 
and accompanied by curtain-like fringes of light. 
Not the least curious of the atmospheric phenomena are the modifications of nervous excitability 
in connection with the perception of light—the wonderful optical illusions witnessed from time to 
time during periods of extraordinary and unequal refraction. One day in July, at Saint Michael's, 
I saw on looking northward an island high up in the air and inverted; some distant peaks, invisible 
on ordinary occasions, loomed up at one time the very shape of a tower-topped building magnified, 
and suddenly changing assumed the shape of immense factory chimneys. Again, off Port Clarence, 
was witnessed the optical phenomenon of dancing mountains and the mirage of ice fifty miles 
away, which caused our experienced ice pilot to say, “ No use to goin here; don’t you see the ice ?” 
Again, the mountains of Bering Straits have so betrayed the imagination that they have been seen 
to assume the most fantastical and grotesque shapes, at one moment that of a mountain not unlike 
Table Mountain, off the Cape of Good Hope; then the changing diorama shows the shape of an 
immense anvil, followed by the likeness of an enormous gun mounted en barbette, the whole stand- 
ing out in silhouette against the background, while looking in an opposite direction at another time 
a whaling vessel turned bottom upward appeared inthe sky. On another occasion, in latitude 70°, 
when the state of the air was favorable to extraordinary refraction, a white gull swimming on the 
water in the distant horizon was taken for an iceberg, or more correctly a floeberg, other gulls in 
the distance, looming up, looked for all the world like white tents on a beach, while others resem- 
bled men with white shirts paddling a canoe. Again, two whaling ships that we knew to be sixty 
miles away, appeared on the distant sky as elongated afternoon shadows ; minute stones and other 
small objects on a mountain side were so distinctly seen as to cause almost a glamour, a kind of 
witchery, to come over the eyesight, which, if there were no evidence to the contrary, might have 
been taken as one of the hallucinations that precede certain forms of insanity, where, for example, 
the sense of sight becomes so acute that a person reads a newspaper or tells the time of day from 
a small watch, on the opposite side of the street. Odd phenomena were oecasionally witnessed 
while looking at the midnight sun, especially when he began to get low in the horizon. His disk 
