260 Professor Blumenbach on the Snow Ophthalmia , 
sternutatory powder, and they are seized, at the same time, 
with a very violent tonic blepharospasmus. These affections 
sometimes, though rarely, disappear in ten days, but not unfre- 
quently they remain for four weeks* *. 
Of the mechanical remedies used by the savages to prevent 
this blindness, which results from an intense glare of light re- 
flected from the snow, I may mention two which happen to be 
at hand ; one of them is of the same kind as that mentioned by 
Xenophon, and is at the present day much in use in those 
northern countries , — something black , which is stretched before 
the eyes ; that is, a sort of net- work or gauze, made of horse- 
hair, a little convex anteriorly, lest it should impede the free 
motion of the eyelids. There is a specimen of this preventive 
machine among the curiosities of our academic museum, pre- 
sented by M. De Asch, to whom I am indebted for innumerable 
articles supplied to my collection of natural objects, with a note 
attached, signifying that it is in use among the Tartars, espe- 
cially when hunting or travelling in winter, and that it is called 
in their language Kaar-yoeslik , which means eye-bandage +. 
The other of these machines is constructed on a very diffe- 
rent plan by the Esquimaux, on the coast of Labrador. Al- 
though we find many things related by Ellis, Crantz, and other 
authors, who have visited those eastern shores of America, re- 
garding the wonderful sagacity with which the Greenlanders 
and Esquimaux construct their snow spectacles, or snow eyes , 
as they call them ; yet, as they seemed to be neither very accu- 
rate nor clear, I applied to one of the missionaries that he 
might give me a more correct account of the matter, in as far as 
regarded the part of the country in which the colonies of his 
brethren had been established. This benevolent man afforded 
me the necessary information, and moreover sent me a specimen 
of those spectacles, made by the Esquimaux themselves of the 
colony of Hoffenthal, on the Labrador coast, and which, both 
* Cartwright’s Journal during a Residence of nearly Sixteen Years on the Coast 
of Labrador, vol. i. p. 102, 
*j* Concerning a similar apparatus used by the Persians for preventing the snow 
ophthalmia, see Chardin’s Travels , vol. i. p. 211. ; and Bell of Antermony’s Travels , 
vol, i. p. 84. 
