238 ON THE VICINITY OF ST. PETERSBURGH. 
season was said to be severer than any that had intervened since u Swaggering 
Boney,” as the provincial ballad termed him, lost his army in the great Autocrat's 
dominions. As the effect of low temperature may be either indistinctly remem- 
bered, or forgotten by many, I shall not consider it ill-timed to state the results 
of a few experiments that have been made to ascertain this point:—Boiling water 
thrown up by an engine, so as to spread at-—24° Reaumur, has fallen down in 
particles of dry ice; at the same temperature Dr. King found a bottle of common 
water frozen into a solid piece of ice in an hour and a quarter; and on the 
morning that I mentioned, when the thermometer stood at—29°, I exposed to the 
air two Copper vessels of a cylindrical shape, three inches in diameter, and four 
deep, one filled with cold, the other with boiling water; the first was frozen into 
solid ice in 15 minutes, the later in 23, and the expansion of congealed water 
was prettily shown by half an inch of ice, which projected over the rims of the 
vessels; this expansion under the influence of cold is peculiar, I believe, to but 
one other body in Nature (cast Iron) ; it has been attributed to a specific 
chemical arrangement of their crystals during the cooling process. Captain 
Franklin, during his first overland American expedition, found the trees as hard 
as Flint, at about—26°, Reaumur, so that almost every axe he had was broken in 
attempts to fell them. At—20°, if the hand, while it is moist, be incautiously 
applied to the metal handle of an outer door, it will adhere ; and, if not imme¬ 
diately removed, in all probability would lose a portion of its skin before its 
liberation could be procured, communicating a sensation so much like that caused 
by the touch of glowing Iron, that the one might be mistaken for the other. A 
piece of Iron also, such as the barrel of a gun, brought from the cold into the 
heated atmosphere of a house, appears to smoke, or give off a vapour; but this is 
a deception, and proceeds from the rapid condensation of water, held in suspen¬ 
sion by the air, upon the metal. I was desirous of experiencing the sensation of 
cold at—29, Reaumur, without my cloak, and for this purpose left a warm room, 
and walked out in a simple English dress, about a hundred yards from the house. 
The air at first affected my lungs, and made me cough (which it will do at—15 
or 16 degrees); it next appeared to permeate my clothes, and instantly to act on 
the surface of my body, like the suffusion of a cold fluid. A small Dog that 
followed me out, the soles of whose feet, accustomed to a carpet, were thin and 
nervous, commenced limping to relieve them, till, fairly overcome with pain, he 
began to sing out lustily; when I took him up in my arms" and returned, to 
restore my stock of animal heat, which had been almost dissipated even in so 
short a time. 
The faces of people engaged abroad in severe weather present a strange 
appearance, especially those of the bearded peasantry of Russia, from the breath 
congealing the moment it leaves the mouth, and incrusting the whiskers and hair 
