EFFECTS OF THE COLD. 45 



mild and comfortable when the thermometer rose to zero — 

 that is, when it was 32° below the freezing-point !" One 

 of Dr. Kane's crew put an icicle into his mouth to crack it, 

 when the thermometer was at 28°; one fragment stuck 

 to his tongue, and two to his lips, each taking off a bit of 

 skin, burning it off, if this term might be used in an inverse 

 sense. The same writer observes, " that at 25° the 

 beard, eyebrows, eyelashes, &c., acquire a delicate, white, 

 and perfectly enveloping cover of venerable hoar-frost. The 

 moustache and under-lip form pendulous beads of dangling 

 ice. Put out your tongue, and it instantly freezes to this 

 icy crusting, and a rapid effort and some hand-aid will be 

 required to liberate it. Your chin has a trick of freezing to 

 your upper jaw by the biting aid of your beard. My eyes 

 have often been so glued as to show that even a wink may 

 be unsafe.'' 



One day Dr. Kane walked himself into "a comfortable 

 perspiration " with the thermometer seventy degrees below 

 freezing-point ! A breeze sprang up, and instantly the sen- 

 sation of cold was intense. His beard, coated before with 

 icicles, seemed to bristle with increased stiffness, and an un- 

 fortunate hole in the back of his mitten " stung like burning 

 coal." On the next day, while walking, his beard and mous- 

 tache became one solid mass of ice. Inadvertently he put 

 out his tongue, and it instantly froze fast to his lip. This 

 being nothing new, costing only a smart pull and a bleeding 

 afterwards, he put up his mittened hands to " blow hot," and 

 thaw the unruly member from its imprisonment. Instead of 

 succeeding, his mitten was itself a mass of ice in a moment; 

 it fastened on the upper side of his tongue, and flattened it 

 out like a batter-cake between the two disks of a hot griddle. 

 It required all his care with the bare hands to release it, and 

 then not without laceration. 



Such is the relation of the rigors experienced by Arctic 

 navigators in the frozen regions. The Esquimaux, on the 



