When the Innuit brings the seal to the igloo, a crowd invades the narrow space, for the simplest hospitality prevails, and the long watch, the skilful stroke, do not constitute sole ownership of the prize. The skin is stripped off the huge unsightly carcass, and a horrible scene ensues. The flesh is torn or cut with the stone knives in large lumps, and having been first licked by the women, to remove any hairs or other adhesive matter, is distributed to the party, and devoured raw; the blood is drunk, the bones are mashed, the entrails are greedily eaten, the dogs sharing in all; and the blubber is made to yield its oil by the disgusting process already described. One turns silenced from the picture; from the sights, and sounds, and scents; from the vision of dark faces, eager with gluttonous longing, gathered round the red, flaring light; from the skin-clothed bodies, reeking with grease and filth, and the foul exhalations of the mutilated animal; from the lumps of flesh torn by savage hands, and crammed dripping into distended mouths; from the steaming blood, and the human creatures who rapturously quaff it in the presence of the white man, who sits among them and feeds with them, whose heart yearns with dumb compassion for them, who has wonderful scientific instruments in his pockets, and his Bible in his breast. As the seal teaches the Innuits the art of housing themselves, so the white bear teaches them how to kill the walrus, their most plentiful and frequent food, when the ice is drifting, and the unwieldy creatures lie upon the blocks close inshore; then the bear climbs the overhanging precipice, and taking a heavy block in his deft forepaws, he hurls it with rare skill and nicety of aim upon the basking monster below. So brutes train men in those dreadful regions, and not men brutes. The life of the Innuits is full of such contradictions. And their deaths? From the contemplation of these one turns away appalled, for they die in utter solitude.
When Captain Hall first heard of this horrible custom, he started off at once to see its truth; and having removed the blocks with which the doorway had been built up, entered an igloo, and found a woman who had yet many days to linger thus fastened up in her living tomb. Again, hearing that a woman had been abandoned to die, at a great distance, he set forth, [{712}] and having reached the spot with immense difficulty and danger, he managed to remove the snow and the block which closed the hole in the top of the igloo, lowered himself into it, and found the woman dead, and frozen as hard as her bier and her tomb, with a sweet serene smile upon the marble face. So this is the close of a life of toil and privation—the withdrawal of every kindred face, the fearful solitude of the ice-walls, the terrible arctic darkness and silence, and the frozen corpse lying unshrouded, naked, beneath the frozen skins, until the resurrection. Surely the angel of death is an angel of mercy there, and does his errand gently, bearing away the lonely, terrified spirit to the city of gold, the gates of pearl, the jasper sea, the land where there is no darkness, physical or mental, for evermore. The earth, always pitiless to them, which never feeds them from her bosom, does not suffer her dead children of the Innuit people to sleep their last sleep in her lap. Their graves are only blocks of ice piled around and above the corpses, which remain unharmed, unless when the blocks melt, as they sometimes do, and the wolves, dogs, or bears gain access to the frozen remains. The Innuits are dying out; disease is making havoc among them; consumption, formerly unknown, is thinning their numbers by its slow, furtive, murderous advance; their children are few, and fewer still are reared; and the long story of awful desolation draws to a close. Who can regret it? Who can do aught but desire that the giant wastes of the arctic regions should be left to the soulless creatures of God; that the great discord between them and human life has ceased to trouble the harmony of creation; that the mystery of such an existence is quietly laid at rest, among the things which "we know not now, but which we shall know hereafter?"
MISCELLANY.
SCIENCE.
A New Kind of Mirror.—The Chemical News states that M. Dode, a French chemist, has introduced platinum mirrors, which are greatly admired, and which present this advantage, that the reflecting metal is deposited on the outer surface of the glass, and thus any defect in the latter is concealed. The process, which is patented in Paris, is described as follows: Chloride of platinum is dissolved in water, and a certain quantity of oil of lavender is added to the solution. The platinum immediately leaves the aqueous solution and passes to the oil, which holds it in suspension in a finely divided state. To the oil so charged the author adds litharge and borate of lead, and paints a thin coat of this mixture over the surface of the glass, which is then carried to a proper furnace. At a red heat the litharge and borate of lead are fused, and cause the adhesion of the platinum to the softened glass. The process is very expeditious. A single baking, M. Dode says, will furnish 200 metres of glass ready for commerce. It would take fifteen days, he says, to coat the same extent with mercury by the ordinary plan.
African Silkworm.—A silkworm before unknown in Europe has been introduced into France from Senegal, and without suffering from change of climate. It yields a richer silk than that of any other worm known to naturalists, and its cocoons are twice the ordinary weight. It is to be tried in Algiers, and if successful there, this new and rich silk may become in time an important article of commerce.
Science in a Balloon.—Mr. Glaisher has [{713}] given, in a lecture at the Royal Institution, a resumé of his scientific experiments in balloons. Tables recording the decline of temperature with elevation, show that when the sky was clear a more rapid decline took place than when the sky was cloudy. Under a clear sky, a fall of 1° takes place within 100 feet of the earth, but at heights exceeding 25,000 feet it is necessary to pass through 1,000 feet of vertical height to obtain a fall of 1° in temperature. At extreme elevations, in both states of the sky, the air became very dry, but as far as his experiments went, was never quite free from water. From ascents made before and after sunset, Mr. Glaisher concludes that the laws which hold good by day do not hold good by night; indeed, it seemed probable that at night, for some little distance, the temperature may increase with elevation, instead of decreasing. From experiments made on solar radiation with a blackened bulb thermometer, and with Herschel's actinometer, it was inferred that the heat rays from the sun pass through space without loss, and become effective in proportion to the density or the amount of water present in the atmosphere through which they pass. If this be so, the proportion of heat received at Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn may be the same as that received at the earth, if the constituents of their atmospheres be the same as that of the earth, and greater if the amount of aqueous vapor be greater, so that the effective solar heat at Jupiter and Saturn may be greater than at either the inferior planets, Mercury or Venus, notwithstanding their far greater distances from the sun. This conclusion is most important as corroborating Professor Tyndall's experiments on aqueous vapor. Experiments on the wind showed that the velocity of the air at the earth's surface was very much less than at a high elevation. A comparison of the temperature of the dew point, as shown by different instruments, gave results proving that the temperatures of the dew point, as found by the use of the dry and wet bulb thermometers, and Daniell's hygrometer, are worthy of full confidence as far as the experiments went.
The Eruption of Mount Etna.—At a recent meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences, an important letter was read from M. Fouqué to M. Saint-Claire Deville on the eruption of Etna, which has presented several phenomena of great scientific interest.
The eruption commenced at half-past ten on the evening of January 31. On the previous day two successive shakings of the earth had been noticed. Just before the eruption began a violent earthquake was felt, the wave travelling to the north-east; after this, slight oscillations continued until about 4 A.M. Large flames now rose from a point on the north-east side of Etna 5,500 feet above the snow line, and lava began to flow rapidly. In two or three days the lava traversed a space of 19,000 feet, with a width of from 10,000 to 12,000, and a variable thickness, but often reaching to the depth of 30 or 60 feet. After destroying for some distance everything in its passage, the current of lava struck one of the old craters, and then bifurcated. The stream on the west side moved very slowly, and, becoming subdivided, it nearly ceased to move; the stream on the east side fell over a deep and precipitous valley, which it soon filled, being then able to continue its progress, until finally it was stopped by a lava mound of a previous eruption.
The number of the craters is seven; of these five form a vast elliptical enclosure, the major axis of which is directed toward the north-east. A deep fissure, 1,500 feet in length, opened from the base of a former crater, Frumento, to the nearest of the present cones. This chasm, M. Fouqué shows, was probably formed by the shock at the commencement of the eruption. This fissure, and also a depression of the crater Frumento, is in a right line with the major axis of the ellipse formed by the craters. The same general fact has been several times noticed in previous eruptions.