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 

 >ther mountains, and during a certain period of thaw, sub- 

 jected it to various experiments, which led him to the con- 

 clusion 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. 



Ramond met with red snow in the Pyrenees, at an elevation 

 of 7800 feet. He discovered in it, when burnt on incande- 

 scent coals, the odour of opium or of chicory. He supposed 

 that the little deep red lamellae which coloured the snow were 

 mica, and looked upon the mica as a product of the decompo- 



