214 IMPORTANCE OF SNOW. 
ilate the winter state of the ground to that of wooded regions 
under softer skies; and it is a circumstance well worth noting, 
that in Southern Europe, where Nature has denied to the earth 
a warm winter-garment of flocculent snow, she has, by one of 
those compensations in which her empire is so rich, clothed the 
hillsides with umbrella and other pines, ilexes, cork-oaks, bays, 
and other trees of persistent foliage, whose evergreen leaves 
afford to the soil a protection analogous to that which it derives 
from snow in more northern climates. 
The water imbibed by the soil in winter sinks until it meets 
a more or less impermeable or a saturated stratum, and then, 
by unseen conduits, slowly finds its way to the channels of 
springs, or oozes out of the ground in drops which unite in 
rills, and so all is conveyed to the larger streams, and by them 
finally to the sea. The water, in percolating through the vege- 
table and mineral layers, acquires their temperature, and is 
chemically affected by their action, but it carries very little 
matter in mechanical suspension. 
The process I have described is a slow one, and the supply 
of moisture derived from the snow, augmented by the rains of 
the following seasons, keeps the forest-ground, where the sur- 
face is level or but moderately inclined, in a state of approxi- 
mate saturation throughout almost the whole year. * 
the wind by a tight board fence about five feet high, while another body of 
snow, much more sheltered from the sun than the first, six feet in depth, and 
about sixteen feet square, was fully exposed to the wind. When the thaw 
came on, which lasted about a fortnight, the larger body of snow was entirely 
dissolved in less than a week, while the smaller body was not wholly gone at 
the end of the second week. 
“ Hqual quantities of snow were placed in vessels of the same kind and 
capacity, the temperature of the air being seventy degrees. In the one case, 
a coustant current of air was kept passing over the open vessel, while the other 
was proteectd by a cover. The snow ‘in the first was dissolved in sixteen 
minutes, while the latter had a small unthawed proportion remaining at the 
end of eighty-five minutes.” 
The snow in the woods is protected in the same way, though not literally to 
the same extent, as by the fence in one of these cases and the cover in the other. 
* The statements I have made, here and elsewhere, respecting the humidity 
