THE WORLD'S WONDERS. 725 



lo those unacquainted with a Polar climate, hut it is nonetheless 

 u fact. Dr. Kane made the following observation in his diary of 

 February 24, 1854 : 



" A bitter disappointment met us at our evening meal. The 

 flesh of our deer was nearly uneatable from putrefaction ; the 

 liver and intestines, from which I had expected so much, utterly 

 so. The rapidity of such a change, in a temperature as low as 

 minus 35, seems curious ; but the Greenlanders say that extreme 

 cold is rather a promoter than otherwise of the putrefactive pro- 

 cess. All the grass-eating animals have the same tendency, as is 

 well known to the butchers. Our buffalo-hunters, when they 

 condescend to clean a carcass, do it at once ; they have told m > 

 that the musk-ox is sometimes tainted after five minutes' expo- 

 sure. The Esquimaux, with whom there is no fastidious sensi- 

 bility of palate, are in the practice at Yotlik and Horses' Head, 

 in latitude 73 40', even in the severest weather, of withdrawing 

 the viscera immediately after death and filling the cavity with 

 stones." 



Another fact, hardly less interesting, is found in the serious 

 effect produced by the eating of ice or snow, the latter particu- 

 larly. Reference is made to this in a description of the suffer- 

 ings of Elison, of the Greely Expedition. In a Polar atmos- 

 phere there is such rapid evaporation of heat from the body that 

 the internal temperatureis materially lowered, sometimes as much 

 as two degrees, while in the mouth there is a total absence of 

 caloric, so that snow or ice will not melt within the closed mouth. 

 During such times any attempt to quench thirst by eating snow is 

 followed by results almost identical with that of a piece of highly- 

 heated iron held in the mouth ; it burns so intensely that the 

 tongue is speedily reduced to a blistered and then raw condition, 

 just as if the covering, or papillae, were entirely burned off. Its 

 effects upon tin L -icous membrane of the mouth are no less dis- 

 astrous. Man , persons tortured by thirst have lain down their 

 lives in the Arctic regions after the most excruciating sufferings, 

 by not heeding the warnings given them against eating snow. 



Capt. Hall, during his expedition to King William Land, in 



