not offer much inducement for prolonged trips from the vessels. One John Pearson, a marine, had imprudently gone out without his mittens, to attempt hunting, and with a musket in his hands. A party from the ships found him, although the night was very dark, just as he had fallen down a bank of snow, and was beginning to feel that degree of torpor and drowsiness which, if indulged, inevitably proves fatal. “When he was brought on board,” says Parry, “his fingers were quite stiff, and bent into the shape of that part of the musket which he had been carrying; and the frost had so far destroyed the animation in his fingers on one hand that it was necessary to amputate three of them a short time after, notwithstanding all the care and attention paid to him by the medical gentlemen. The effect which exposure to severe frost has in benumbing the mental as well as the corporeal faculties was very striking in this man, as well as in two of the young gentlemen who returned after dark, and of whom we were anxious to make inquiries respecting Pearson. When I sent for them into my cabin, they looked wild, spoke thick and indistinctly, and it was impossible to draw from them a rational answer to any of our questions. After being on board for a short time the mental faculties appeared gradually to return with the returning circulation; and it was not till then that a looker-on could easily persuade himself that they had not been drinking too freely.” At other times excursions were made when the thermometer was 40° or 50° below zero without special inconvenience. The fact is that one’s safety or danger much depends on the absence or prevalence of wind. Even the natives of extreme latitudes have been frozen to death during its prevalence. On February 24th, 1820, a fire broke out in their house ashore, and in their anxiety to save the valuable instruments it contained, sixteen men incurred frost-bite, the thermometer on that day being from -43° to -44° (76° below freezing). One man, by incautiously leaving his gloves off, had afterwards to suffer the amputation of most of his fingers. When he arrived on board his hands were plunged in cold water, the surface of which was immediately covered with a skin of ice by the cold suddenly communicated! “The appearance,” says Parry, “which our faces presented at the fire was a curious one, almost every nose and cheek having become quite white with frost-bites in five minutes after being exposed to the weather; so that it was deemed necessary for the medical gentlemen, together with some others appointed to assist them, to go constantly round while the men were working at the fire, and to rub with snow the parts affected, in order to restore animation.”