January 1, 1886.] 



SCIENCE. 



19 



scorched plain ; and we could trace the progress of 

 a single Kirghis horseman five miles away by the 

 cloud of dust which his horse's hoofs raised from 

 the steppe. I suffered constantly and intensely 

 from the heat and thirst, and had to protect my- 

 self from the fierce sunshine by swathing my 

 body in four thicknesses of heavy blanket, and 

 j^utting a big down pillow over my legs. You 

 can perhaps imagine what that sunshine was, 

 when I tell you that I could not hold my bare 



nausea and fainting (sunstroke ?), and who advised 

 me not to travel between eleven o'clock in the 

 morning and four in the afternoon, when the day 

 was cloudless and hot. The idea of having a sun- 

 stroke in Siberia, and the suggestion not to travel 

 in the middle of the day, seemed to me so pre- 

 posterous that I could not restrain a smile of half 

 incredulous amusement. Governor Tseklinski, the 

 military governor at Semipalatinsk, subsequently 

 told me that he had seen the thermometer stand 



7\0 Kfion* I 



hand in it without pain, and that wrapping my 

 body in four thicknesses of heavy blanketing gave 

 me at once a sensation of coolness. Tolerably 

 familiar as I was with Siberia, I little thought, when 

 I left Tiumen, that I should find in it a North 

 African desert with whirling sand-columns, and 

 sunshine from which I should have to protect my- 

 self with blankets. I almost laughed at a Russian 

 officer in Omsk who told me that the heat in the 

 valley of the Irtish was often so intense as to cause 



at 130° F. in the valley of the Irtish, with a sand- 

 storm from the south, and that breathing during 

 the prevalence of this simoom-like wind was at- 

 tended with an almost insupportable sense of 

 suffocation. We saw nothing so bad as that ; but 

 at the station of Voroninskaya, in the middle of 

 the arid desert of the upper Irtish, we were over- 

 taken by a furious sand-storm from the south-west 

 with a temperature of 90° F. in the shade in our 

 tarantass. The sand and fine hot dust were car- 



