LIFE IN BOILING WATER. 75 



mud, in which are imbedded large crystals of gypsum, 

 three inches long, and of sulphate of soda. " The mud, 

 in many places, was thrown up by numbers of some kind 

 of worm. How surprising is it that any creatures should 

 be able to exist in brine, and that they should be crawl- 

 ing among crystals of sulphate of soda and lime ! And 

 what becomes of these worms when, during the long 

 summer, the surface is hardened into a solid layer of 

 salt?"* Exactly similar lakes, similarly peopled, occur 

 in Siberia also.-f* 



Perhaps even stranger still is the circumstance that 

 fishes — vertebrate animals far higher in the organic scale 

 than shrimps or worms — can subsist, apparently in health, 

 in water sufficiently heated to boil them if dead. Brous- 

 sonet found, by experiments, that several species of fresh- 

 water fishes lived many days in water so hot that the 

 human hand could not be held in it for a single minute. 

 Saussure found living eels in the hot springs of Aix, in 

 Savoy, in which the temperature is pretty regularly 113 

 deg. of Fahrenheit. But stUl more extraordinary are 

 the facts recorded by Humboldt and Bonpland, who saw 

 living fishes, apparently in health and vigour, thrown up 

 from the crater of a volcano in South America, with 

 water and hot vapour that raised the thermometer to 210 

 deg. Fahrenheit, a heat less, by only two degrees, than 

 that of boiling water. 



The same accomplished travellers visited hot springs in 



* Naturalist's Voyage, chap. iv. 



t Pallas's Travels, 1793 to 1794, pp. 129-134. 



