722 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST.  [VOL. XXXII. 
night. But little snow falls during the winter, and this is so 
fine and dry that the wind keeps it constantly in motion, form- 
ing deep and hard drifts under all the banks, while many 
exposed places are swept entirely clean. The snow begins to 
soften and melt about the first week in April, but the ground is 
not wholly bare before the middle or end of June, while drifts 
last all summer in some of the gullies. It is on such snow 
banks that I have seen the patches of “ red snow ” (Protococcus 
nivalis) looking like claret spilled on the snow. 
The sea is usually closed by freezing and the moving in of 
the pack ice from the middle of October to the end of July. 
The pack seldom moves far offshore, and there is usually much 
floating ice all summer. The incoming heavy ice generally 
grounds on a bar parallel to the shore, and about 1000 yards 
distant from it, forming a “land floe” of high, broken hum- 
mocks, inshore of which the sea freezes over smooth and un- 
disturbed by the pressure of the outside pack, which is usually 
very rough, consisting of fragments of old and new ice of all 
‘sizes thrown together in indescribable confusion. During the 
early part of the winter this pack is seldom at rest, sometimes 
moving northeastward with the prevailing current and grinding 
along the edge of the land floe, sometimes moving off to sea 
before an offshore wind, leaving “leads” of open water, which 
in calm weather are immediately covered with new ice (at the 
rate of 6 inches in 24 hours), and again coming in with greater 
or less violence against the edge of this new ice, crushing and 
crumbling it up against the edge of the land floe. The westerly 
gales of the late winter, however, bring in great quantities of 
ice, which pressing against the land floe are pushed up into 
hummocks and grounded firmly in deeper water, thus increasing 
the breadth of the fixed land floe until the line of separation 
between this and the moving pack is 4 or 5 or sometimes even 
8 miles from shore. The hummocks of this broad land floe 
show a tendency to arrange themselves in lines parallel to the 
shore, and if the pressure has not been too great there are often 
fields of the ice of the season not over 4 feet thick between the 
ranges of hummocks. After the gales are over, the pack 1s 
generally quiet till about the middle of April, when easterly 
