WONDERFUL SEAL ISLANDS. 195 



the moisture and clearing up the air. By the end of January, or 

 early in February, they usually bring, by their steady pressure, 

 from the north and northwest, great fields of broken ice, sludgy 

 floes, with nothing in them approximating or approaching glacial 

 ice. They are not very heavy or thick, but as the wind blows they 

 compactly cover the whole surface of the sea, completely shutting 

 in the land, and for months at a time hush the wonted roar of the 

 surf. In the exceptionally cold seasons that succeed each other up 

 there every four or five years, for periods of three and even four 

 months from December to May, and sometimes into June the 

 islands will be completely environed and ice-bound. On the other 

 hand, in about the same rotation, occur exceptionally mild winters. 

 Not even the sight of an ice-blink is recorded then during the whole 

 winter, and there is very little skating on the shallow lakes and 

 lagoons peculiar to St. Paul and St. George. This, however, is not 

 often the case. 



The breaking up of winter-weather and the precipitation of 

 summer (for there is no real spring or autumn in these latitudes), 

 usually commences about the first week in ApriL The ice begins 

 to leave or dissolve at that time, or a little later, so that by the 1st 

 or 5th of May, the beaches and rocky sea-margin beneath the mural 

 precipices are generally clear and free from ice and snow, although 

 the latter occasionally lies, until the end of July or the middle of 

 August, in gullies and on leeward hill-slopes, where it has drifted 

 during the winter. Fog, thick and heavy, rolls up from the sea, and 

 closes over the land about the end of May. This, the habitual sign 

 of summer, holds on steadily to the middle or end of October again. 



The periods of change in climate are exceedingly irregular 

 during the autumn and spring, so-called, but in summer a cool, 

 moist, shady gray fog is constantly present. To this certainty of 

 favored climate, coupled with the perfect isolation and an exceed- 

 ing fitness of the ground, is due, without doubt, that preference 

 manifested by the warm-blooded animals which come here every 

 year, in thousands and hundreds of thousands to breed, to the 

 practical exclusion of all other ground.* 



I simply remark here, that the winter which I passed upon St. 



* A large amount of information in regard to the climate of these islands 

 has been collected and recorded by the signal service, United States Army, 

 and similar observations are still continued by the agents of the Alaska Com- 

 mercial Company. 



