1 1 8 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



the feeling does not last, and is speedily forgotten, 

 or else set down as an effect of mere novelty. In 

 Melville it was very strong ; it stirred him deeply, 

 and caused him to ponder with awe on its meaning ; 

 and the conclusion he came to was that it is an 

 instinct in us an instinct similar 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 common hereditary ex- 

 perience 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 desolations, and stupendous cala- 

 mities overwhelming the race of man. 



It is a sublime conception, adequately expressed ; 

 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 obliterated 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 spectralness over the fancy, 

 and instinctive horror, which the surviving remnant 

 transmitted by inheritance 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 ; never- 

 theless, I reject Melville's explanation in favour of 



