420 



FARMERS' REGISTER. 



[No. 7 



aciJulates, heats and rots, antl, therefore, you must 

 haul as you grinti. In Louisiana, on the ap- 

 proach ol' li-ost, you may cut a three weeks' sup- 

 ply, and will make suirar without rot, and with- 

 out ucidulation. Iti the United Stales, there is 

 properly no ?ugar country; the plantations on the 

 seaboard, beyond and on the Mississippi, to the 

 parallel ot' New Orleans, can only, and can 

 scarcely be called such. The crop is a hazardous 

 one. and the sugar interest is a debt; it is a forced 

 crop, and the mode of cultivation of the best 

 planters shows it. They push the early growth, 

 and drain well to keep (iom the cold occasioned by 

 the transpiration water, through and under their le- 

 vees, the river being then ixenerally higher than 

 the surlijce of their cane fields. Cane planted in 

 October, is better than in the spring. The cane 

 requires a strong soil and a long season, to give 

 the maturity, and that degree of richness or sac- 

 charum to the juice, that makes the sugar. New 

 land and late canes give equally large stalks; but 

 thesaccharum is not there, and sometimes so defi- 

 cient, that it will only make molasses. Where, 

 above New Orleans, sugar is successfully made, 

 as in the La Fourche, the Terre Bonne, &c., there 

 the soil is very free, and hastens the maturity. 

 As I have said before, the true sugar country is 

 Texas; and when society and security, and health 

 and good jrovernment, shall have overcome the 

 raution of the more wealthy, it will be a splendid 

 country, and the fliture El ])orado. 



A Planter. 



Fromttie Edinburgli New Fhilosoplijeal Journal. 

 ON THE FROZEN SOIL OF SIBERIA. 



JBy Professor Baer of St. Pelcrsburgh. 



It has long since been ascertained, says M. 

 Baer, that over a great extent of country, the soil 

 ot Siberia is never entirely free from ice; during the 

 summer, the surface of the ground is, to a greater 

 or less depth, thawed; but at some distance from 

 the surface, a bottom of perpetual ice is met with. 

 Graelin, the elder, in his travels in Siberia, states 

 that shortly after the foundation of the town 

 Yakutzk (in latitude 62^" north; longitude 130° 

 east nearly,) at the end of the seventeenth centu- 

 ry, the soil of that place was found to be frozen at 

 a depth of 91 feet, and that the people were com- 

 pelled to give up the design of sinking a well. 

 Many other lacls of this description were collect- 

 ed by travellers about the middle of the last cen- 

 tury; but these facts seem not to have been gene- 

 rally credited; and even in 1825, Leopold Von 

 Buch, a philosopher, whose opinion is of the 

 greatest weight in all questions connected with 

 the physical condition of the globe, rejected these 

 fstatements as entirely erroneous; yet they have 

 been corroborated in our days by the travels of 

 Erman and Humboldt. Untd very lately, nothing 

 was known respecting the thickness of the frozen 

 surface; but within these lew years a merchant of 

 the name of Schargin, having attempted to sink 

 a well at Yakutzk, was about to abandon the 

 project in despair of obtaining water, when Ad- 

 miral Wrangel persuaded him to continue his 

 operations till he had perforated the whole stra- 

 tum of ice. This he did, and kept a complete 

 joHrnal of his work. The well, or pit, of M. 



Schargin had been sunk to the depth of 382 feet", 

 and at thai distance from the surface, the soil was 

 very loose, and the temperature of the earth ^'^ 

 Reaumur, (31*^ Fahr.,) but nearer the surface it 

 had been much lower, and had increased as fol- 

 lows : Reaumur, 0° at some feet below tiic sur- 

 face; 5'"> at 77 feet; 4o at 119 feet; 2^ at 217 feet; 

 lA^ at 305 feet; i.° at 350; 1° at 382 feet. As the 

 soil had already become loose at 350 feet, and as 

 the aperture of the well was eight feet square, 

 and the work carried on partly during winter, 

 when, of course, the column of cold air muat 

 have rushed into the pit and chilled the tempera- 

 ture, it is probable that the spot at which the tlier- 

 nnometer marked the freezing point, was at the 

 depth of 350 feet. This immense thickness of 

 ground ice would prove that Siberia must have 

 been for a long period in the same physical condi- 

 tion as it is at present. In the actual state of our 

 information on this subject, it is impossible to de- 

 termine how widely this layer of ground-ice is 

 spread under the surface of Siberia; yet we know 

 enough to say that it extends over an immense 

 tract of country. Humboldt found the soil frozen 

 at a depth of six feet at Bosgolowsk, near the 

 Ural, in GO^ north latitude. Near Beresow, Er- 

 man found the temperature of the earth at a depth 

 of 23 feet, still+io.6, (35^o F.,) but in 1821a 

 dead body was disinterred, which had been bu- 

 ried 92 years before; the earth around it was fro- 

 zen, the and body did not show any signs of de- 

 composition. It "has long been known that at Ob- 

 dorsk, in north latitude 68^, the ground is always 

 frozen. Near Tobolsk, no ice is (bund in the soil, 

 but as we proceed to the eastward, the ground-ice 

 advances farther north. It is to be hoped that mea- 

 surements of the temperature will shortly be made 

 at different depths at Yakutzk, and by methods 

 which M. Schargin was unable to employ; also 

 it is desirable to institute an inquiry as to the 

 depth at Avhich the ice annually disappears near 

 the surface, and collect information on the depth 

 of ground-ice generally in Siberia. It would also 

 be highly gratifying to me, and extremely inter- 

 esting to science in general, if the Geographical 

 Society of London, would collect information re- 

 specting the extent of the layer of ground-ice in 

 North America, the thickness which it attains, 

 and how much of it disappears by the summer 

 heat, in those countries over which the factories of 

 the Hudson's Bay Company are disseminated. 

 At the termination of the reading of this paper, 

 an animated discussion took place on the frozen 

 soil of Siberia, in which the members stated their 

 views on the subject. It appears to be generally 

 considered, that the experiment at Yakutzk had 

 not been made with sufficient care, to authorize 

 the belief that the frost penetrates to so great a 

 depth as 350 feet below the surface of the globe; 

 also that the statements of M, Arago and Von 

 Buch, and others in our own country, on the in- 

 crease of temperature in proportion to the distance 

 from the surface, were fully borne out by the ob- 

 servation of M. Schargin; and almost exactly in 

 the same ratio as hitherto found. Captain Back 

 stated, that in his many years' experience in the 

 cold regions of North America, even in the height 

 of an arctic summer, he had never found the 

 ground thawed more than four feet below the sur- 

 (iice; but that experiments on the subject were 

 much to be desired. 



