Animals can withstand the effects of heat far better than the severity of cold. The human frame suffers comparatively little even in the burning deserts of Arabia, compared with what it endures in those wastes of ice and snow which form the polar regions. Here the body is stunted in its growth; there is no energy of mind or character; and life itself is only preserved by extraordinary care and attention. When a person is exposed to intense cold, it produces partial imbecility; he neglects even those precautions which may enable him to withstand its severity. He refuses to exercise his limbs, without which they become torpid; and, unable to resist the drowsiness that seizes on his frame, he resigns himself to its influence, becomes insensible, and dies. Even in our own climate this is not an unfrequent occurrence; and we cannot conclude this paper better than by quoting the expressive lines of Thomson, describing the death of an unhappy peasant from the severity of a winter storm:-- As thus the snows arise; and foul, and fierce, All winter drives along the darkened air; In his own loose revolving fields, the swain Disaster’d stands; sees other hills ascend, Of unknown joyless brow; and other scenes, Of horrid prospect, shag the trackless plain: Nor finds the river nor the forest, hid Beneath the formless wild; but wanders on From hill to dale, still more and more astray, Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps, Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of home Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul! What black despair, what horror fills his breast! When for the dusky spot, which fancy feign’d His tufted cottage rising through the snow, He meets the roughness of the middle waste Far from the track and blest abode of man, While round him might resistless closes fast, And every tempest, howling o’er his head, Renders the savage wildness more wild. Then throng the busy shapes into his mind, Of covered pits unfathomably deep, A dire descent! beyond the power of frost; Of faithless bogs; Of precipices huge Smoothed up with snow; and what is land, unknown, What water of the still unfrozen spring, In the loose marsh or solitary lake, Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils. These check his fearful steps; and down he sinks Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift, Thinking o’er all the bitterness of death, Mix’d with the tender anguish nature shoots Through the wrung bosom of the dying man-- His wife--his children--and his friends unseen. In vain for him the officious wife prepares The fire, fair, blazing, and the vestment warm. In vain his little children, peeping out Into the mingling storm, demand their sire With tears of artless innocence. Alas! Nor wife, nor children more shall he behold--