Forty men and twelve horses will cut and stow away 400 tons a day. In favourable weather 100 men are sometimes employed at once. When a thaw or a fall of rain occurs, it entirely unfits the ice for market, by rendering it opake and porous; and occasionally snow is immediately followed by rain, and that again by frost, forming snow-ice, which is valueless, and must be removed by the ‘plane.’ The operation of ‘planing’ is somewhat similar to that of ‘cutting.’ A plane gauged to run in the grooves made by the ‘marker,’ and which shaves the ice to the depth of three inches, is drawn by a horse, until the whole surface of the ice is planed. The chips thus produced are then scraped off; and if the clear ice is not reached, the process is repeated. If this makes the ice too thin for cutting, it is left in _statu quo_, and a few nights of hard frost will add below as much as has been taken off above. In addition to filling their ice-houses at the lake and in the large towns, the company fill a large number of private ice-houses during the winter, all the ice for these purposes being transported by railway. It will easily be believed, that the expense of providing tools, building houses, furnishing labour, and constructing and keeping up the railway, is very great; but the traffic is so extensive, and the management of the trade so good, that the ice can be furnished, even in England, at a very trifling cost[412] (it is retailed at twopence per pound).] FOOTNOTES [364] Proverbs, xxv. ver. 13. [365] Bartholini de Nivis Usu Medico Observationes, Hafn. 1661. [366] Seneca, Quæst. Natur. iv. 13. [367] Athenæus, iii. p. 124. [368] Sympos. vi. quæst. 6.--Augustinus De Civitate Dei, xxi. 4, p. 610. [369] Mémoires Instructifs pour un Voyageur. How the snow repositories at Constantinople are constructed, is related by Bellon in his Observat. iii. 22. [370] The dissipated Heliogabalus caused whole mounts of snow to be heaped up in summer in order to cool the air. See Lampridius, Vita Heliogab. cap. 23. [371] Plin. xix. 4.--Latinus Pacatus in Panegyr. Theodos. [372] De la Valle, iii. p. 60, where the Persian ice-pits are described, as well as in Chardin, iv. p. 195. [373] Hist. Nat. xxxi. 3, 23, p. 552. [374] Vita Neronis, cap. 48: Hæc est Neronis decocta. [375] In lib. vi. Hippocrat. de Morbis Vulgar. comment. 4, 10. [376] Meteorol. i. cap. 12. [377] In the place before quoted. [378] Deipnos. iii. p. 124. [379] Ibid. p. 123. [380] See Pitisci Lex. Antiq. Rom. under the word Decocta. [381] Philosoph. Transact. vol. lxv. part i. p. 126. [382] Traité du Mouvement des Eaux. [383] Du Hamel, Hist. de l’Academ. l. i. c. 3, p. 99. [384] Tentamina Experimentorum Acad. del Cim. p. 183. [385] Dissertation sur la Glace. Paris, 1749, 12mo, p. 187. [386] Philosoph. Transact. vol. lxv. part i. p. 124.