Captain Mecham relates that, in October 1852, when crossing that part of Melville Island which intervenes between Liddon Gulf and Winter Harbour, he fell in with as many as three hundred head of deer; and he adds that reindeer were always in sight, in herds varying from ten to sixty in number. One of these herds, containing twenty males, he tried to stalk up to on the 7th of October, but failed in getting a shot at them; for although the does, with the inherent weakness of their sex, showed an excessive curiosity, and made one or two efforts to desert the herd and examine the stranger, the stags would in nowise tolerate such conduct, but chastised them smartly with their antlers, and kept the herd together and in motion by running rapidly round and round, uttering at the same time a strange noise which seemed to alarm the herd, and keep it flying from the suspected danger. The coat of the reindeer in summer-time is remarkably thin, and adapted admirably in colour to that of the snow-denuded soil; but as winter approaches, it thickens, and gradually resumes its snowy whiteness. Though not, strictly speaking, a _fur_, it forms an admirable non-conducting substance. As winter, “ruler of the inverted year,” extends his sway over the Polar World, and food grows scarce and indifferent, and has to be sought over larger areas, the herds break up into companies of ten or twenty animals; the lichens, the reindeer moss already described (_Cetraria Islandica_), and the sprouts of the creeping willow forming their principal food. On this branch of our subject Admiral Sherard Osborn makes two suggestive remarks. Arctic vegetation, he observes, has no time in the autumn to wither or decay--while in full bloom, and before the juices have time to return into the parent root or be otherwise dissipated, the “magic hand of the frost king” strikes them; and thus the wisdom of the Creator has provided for the nourishment of his creatures a fresh and warmth-creating food, lying hid under a mantle of snow, which the instinct of those Arctic animals teaches them to remove and reach the stores so beneficently preserved beneath.