SNOW, AND QUALITY OF WHITENESS 115 



lar to that of the horse with regard to the smell 

 of some animal which has the effect of violently 

 agitating it. He calls it an inherited experience. 

 "Nor, in some things," he says, "does the com- 

 mon hereditary experience of all mankind fail to 

 bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. ' ' 

 Finally, the feeling speaks to us of appalling 

 things in a remote past, of unimaginable desola- 

 tions, and stupendous calamities overwhelming 

 the race of man. 



It is a sublime conception, adequately ex- 

 pressed ; and as we read the imagination pictures 

 to us the terrible struggle of our hardy barbarous 

 progenitors against the bitter killing cold of the 

 last glacial period; but the picture is vague, like 

 striving human figures in a landscape half oblit- 

 erated by wind-driven snow. It was a struggle that 

 endured for long ages, until the gigantic white 

 phantom, from which men sought everywhere to 

 fly, came to be a phantom of the mind, a spec- 

 tralness over the fancy, and instinctive horror, 

 which the surviving remnant transmitted by in- 

 heritance down to our own distant times. 



It is more than likely that cold has been one of 

 the oldest and deadliest enemies to our race; 

 nevertheless, I reject Melville's explanation in 

 favor of another, which seems more simple and 

 satisfactory to its author, at all events : which is, 

 that that mysterious something that moves us at 

 the sight of snow springs from the animism that 

 exists in us, and our animistic way of regarding 



