On the other hand, though, owing to the uniformity of temperature produced by such a waste of ocean, Cape Horn summers are but little warmer than the winters; the difference between the lowest of July and the highest of December being only 18°, the average for the year being 42°; whereas in Canada, far away from the mellowing influence of salt-water, there is an extreme thermometrical range of 150° between the seasons. Compare Cape Horn’s winter temperature of 30° in the latitude of 56° and that of Minnesota of 55° below zero, though St. Paul is six hundred and fifty miles nearer the equator. St. Paul’s average for the year, 44°, is almost identical with that of the Horn, the intense heat of the northern summers almost exactly balancing a degree of cold not exceeded by 20° on the Arctic Ocean. Contrary to the general opinion, the most intense cold is not to be found in the far northern sea where Nansen travelled, but in Siberia. In the centre of that desolate country is a town called Irkutsk in 52° north, or fifteen degrees south of the Polar Circle, at which the lowest natural temperature ever recorded by man has been observed, the spirit thermometers once showing a temperature of 93° below zero, or 53-1/2° below the freezing point of mercury. Artificial cold, though, has far exceeded this reading, as Professor Dewar obtained a temperature of about 370° below zero in the liquefaction of oxygen. This latter figure is about as conceivable as the unit of measure of the astronomer, who adopts as his basis of calculation for celestial distances that extent of space which a ray of light would cover in a year, moving at the rate of one hundred and eighty thousand miles per second. In other words, instead of using one mile, his unit of distance is 5,676,480,000,000 miles, which is known as a light year; and he further crushes us with the information that stars of the seventeenth magnitude are thirty thousand light years away. By this time the exhausted reader has said to himself many times, “What’s all this got to do with the Southern Ocean?” So, with apologies for such an excursion into the infinite, let us continue. We are now kept farther away than ever from the dining-room stove by a new aggregation of garments, very different from the others, which need a little explanation. All the oil-skins in the slop-chest were used up by the men last week, and we have had to manufacture some for them. Many ships make a practice of taking to sea several suits of heavy cotton (which oil-skins are made of), but without being treated with the usual mixture of wax and oil. When, therefore, a ship’s regular stock of oil-skins has been exhausted, the captain produces some of these cotton suits and has them well rubbed with three coats of boiled linseed oil, allowing each coat to dry; the result being thoroughly water-tight, pliable garments, which will not crack, as slop-chest oil-skins have a curious habit of doing.