274 ANTISEPTIC POWER OF FROST. 



sale in the markets, which keep as well s so much 

 firewood while the cold weather lasts. Again, a cask 

 of flour buried on Chamisso Island in the high arctic 

 regions by Captain Beechy in 1826, was perfectly 

 sound and fit for food when disinterred in 1848, and 

 even the iron hoops of the cask were not rusted. * 



Captain Scoresby also says that wood has been found 

 in Spitzbergen which had resisted all injury from the 

 weather during the lapse of a century, f and M. Bleau, 

 in his "Atlas Historique," mentions that the bodies 

 of seven Dutch seamen, who had perished there in 1665, 

 were found 20 years afterwards in the most perfect 

 state of preservation. Lord Duiferin also, in his " Let- 

 ters from High Latitudes," records the fact that in 

 Magdalena Bay, Spitzbergen, 



"there are to be seen, even to this day, the bodies of men 

 who died upwards of 250 years ago, in such complete pre- 

 servation that when you pour hot water on the icy coating 

 w T hich encases them, you can actually see the unchanged 

 features of the dead, through the transparent incrustation." 



It is quite possible that these may be the same bodies 

 mentioned by M. Bleau, and there seems no special 

 reason to doubt that they may thus continue to be 

 preserved, without alteration, even for centuries to 

 come. There is the well-known case, for instance, of 

 bodies of the extinct Mammoth (Elephas Primigenius] 

 and Rhinoceros (R. Antiquitatis) found on the banks 

 of the Lena River in Siberia, preserved in an almost 



* Zoology of the Voyage of H. M.S. Herald, by Sir John Richardson, 

 Edited by Professor Forbes, F.R.S., 1854, p. 8. 



y The Arctic Regions, their Appearance, Climate and Zoology, byCapt. 

 Wm. Scoresby, 1849, p. 115. 



Letters from High Latitudes, by Lord DufFerin, 1858, 4th Edition, 

 p. 221. 



