180 Captain Sabine’s experimejits to determine the 
The house was speedily repaired, the outer room being 
reduced in size to a porch sufficient to contain the stove ; 
and the inner room, which had scarcely been touched by the 
fire, remaining as befoye. 
Towards the end of April the sun had influence to keep 
the thermometer a few degrees above zero for some hours of 
the day. The clocks were now unpacked and set up: the 
flooring being removed, the legs of the stands were placed 
on sleepers sunk some inches into the frozen ground in 
grooves which were excavated by crow bars. 
It may be worthy of remark, that when the boxes con- 
taining the thermometers which accompany the clocks were 
opened, the mercury was observed to be retired into the 
bulbs and frozen, although the temperature of the air had 
not been so low as the freezing point of mercury for several 
weeks. The thermometer boxes were enclosed each with the 
pendulum to which it belonged, in a stout case of oak ; and 
these again were contained in chests holding each one clock 
with its apparatus complete. The thermometers had been 
thoroughly cooled in their cases by the long continued se- 
verity of the winter ; but the warmth had not yet made its 
way through such a multiplicity of enclosures. It may be also 
mentioned, in proof of the slowness with which such a mass 
of solid brass as constituted the bob of the pendulums con- 
forms to the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere, 
compared with the mercury in the thermometer tubes, that 
several hours had elapsed, after the pendulums were taken 
out of their cases, (when it is presumed they also may have 
been at — 4,0°) before they ceased to cause a deposit of moisture 
from the air of the room, which was about the same number 
