The condition of things in the antarctic regions is even still worse than in the arctic. Captain Sir James Ross, when between lat. 66° S. and 77° 5′ S., during the months of January and February, 1841, found the mean temperature to be only 26°·5; and there were only two days when it rose even to the freezing-point. When near the ice-barrier on the 8th of February, 1841, a season of the year equivalent to August in England, he had the thermometer at 12° at noon; and so rapidly was the young ice forming around the ships, that it was with difficulty that he escaped being frozen in for the winter. “Three days later,” he says, “the thick falling snow prevented our seeing to any distance before us; the waves as they broke over the ships froze as they fell on the decks and rigging, and covered our clothes with a thick coating of ice.”[41] On visiting the barrier next year about the same season, he again ran the risk of being frozen in. He states that the surface of the sea presented one unbroken sheet of young ice as far as the eye could discover from the masthead. Lieutenant Wilkes, of the American Exploring Expedition, says that the temperature they experienced in the antarctic regions surprised him, for they seldom, if ever, had it above 30°, even at midday. Captain Nares, when in latitude 64°S., between the 13th and 25th February last (1874), found the mean temperature of the air to be 31°·5; a lower temperature than is met with in the arctic regions, in August, ten degrees nearer the pole.[42] These extraordinarily low temperatures during summer, which we have just been detailing, were due solely to the presence of snow and ice. In South Georgia, Sandwich Land, and some other places which we have noticed, the summers ought to be about as warm as those of England; yet to such an extent is the air cooled by means of floating ice coming from the antarctic regions, and the rays of the sun enfeebled by the dense fogs which prevail, that there is actually not heat sufficient even in the very middle of summer to melt the snow lying on the sea-beach. We read with astonishment that a country in the latitude of England should in the very middle of summer be covered with snow down to the sea-shore—the thermometer seldom rising much above the freezing-point. But we do not consider it so surprising that the summer temperature of the polar regions should be low, for we are accustomed to regard a low temperature as the normal condition of things there. We are, however, mistaken if we suppose that the influence of ice on climate is less marked at the poles than at such places as South Georgia or Sandwich Land.